Reddit reviews The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Its hard to look at someone's portfolio and comment on every aspect of it, but I will offer a couple of comments about specific projects that you may be able to apply across the board.

First, you need to start thinking more about line weight and how your weights in your logos work together. I logos like the MEG logo, scale that down to 1/2" and watch the heart monogram disappear. Some designers will say "Well my logo is not meant to be represented at that size" but good designers plan for those situations even though they are not ideal. This same thought train is two-fold for your Red Cross icon set. Icons should be designed in such a way that things don't disappear when they get small.

Second, declutter your branding projects. In the case of the Pokemon and AbbieArt projects, you have multiple logos. Some companies employ more than one logo and it doesn't always present a problem, but especially in the case of the artist logos, your marks are working against each other. You have a very traditional serif type mark that implies one thing, paired with a very rudimentary hand-drawn script which says quite another. The effect is quite jarring. Pick the mark that you feel represents the artist the best and pare down to it for your portfolio and then work a couple of extra pieces in to show how that mark gets used in different situations.

The Silph Co. project presents a different challenge. An outsider like myself is going to see that mark and recognize it as someone else's work. You are building on it, but not really covering new ground. My advice is to start thinking about a mark that represents the company, but that doesn't draw completely on the pokeball aesthetic. Start looking at logos for real enormous manufacturing companies. Think about elements in the game world that you could use to make a unique mark for the company. Then to tie it back to the products they make, you could do product spec sheets for a pokeball or an isometric drawing with callouts for specific parts of a product with measurements. Try to make it as realistic as possible to draw outsiders into the world you are representing. When you think about giant companies like Apple, or Ford their logos aren't self-referential, in the sense that a Ford truck doesn't have a logo of a truck on the side of it. So when you look at a pokeball and start thinking about the mark you would see on it. Is it another smaller pokeball? I don't think so. (DISCLAIMER: I am not a gamer and have no experience with this game. Sorry if I am getting the terms wrong)

On the Wine infographic, consider revising your icons and your layout to make your message more clear. When you are presenting day-to-day information, consider grouping all of each day's activities together. Accounting for 24 hours at a time will help your viewer digest this information more easily. Also consider readers with low comprehension or illiterate viewers. Your icon representation should be clear enough that they can still glance at it and get the idea. The 1 icon = 2 instances representation dirties the water in this regard, so much so that you are forced to notate every icon which defeats the inherent purpose of an icon. If you have a passion for data visualization, this fantastic book by Edward Tufte is a great resource for how viewers read and process charts and graphs.

For your giraffe poster and your abstract poster- Start thinking about working these pieces into a brand piece or creating more elements to go with them. For the giraffe, could you represent a giraffe in 5 different ways with geometric patterns, or could you add two more animals and turn it into a branding piece for a zoo? Could you do a progression of more and more abstract giraffes to see how far you can go with the geometric shapes? When I look at pieces like that, I want to know more about the thought behind it, and then I want to see it pushed out across multiple pieces, reshaped, given some life. This goes for all of your pieces. If you do a business card, add a shirt in, or a bag, a billboard, a clever infographic about some service the business offers, anything you can to show agencies that you are thinking about how your marks and your ideas will play out across a range of platforms. For some of the projects like the Pokemon piece, consider designing a brand book to show how your mark gets used on the side of a truck, or in 3d building signage. The possibilities are endless!!

I think you have a good start. You have some decent ideas. Its time to start breathing life into them and tightening them up. shore up some of the little details that need worked out and then start expanding them.

tl;dr: Work on your line width relationships, work on making marks that are consistent and evoke the brand message, flesh out your projects a bit more, work on relating quantitive info more clearly. clean up your icons, sorry this is so long.

Fair enough. You can improve your design sensibilities and make your outsourcing more effective, without doing any hands on design work, if your wrists can't take it. If you're interested in improving your design sense, getting copies of these books would be a good investment:

• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information - Edward R. Tufte
  
• Envisioning Information - Edward R. Tufte
  
  Then just look at stuff - everything you see around you in the human built environment is an example of design - de-construct the designs you see in your head - is that good design? Why? Why not? Look at other people's websites - are they well designed? Why? Why not? Print, posters, ad's, flyers, books, signage, buildings, cars - everything. Learn to look at everything you see with a critical design eye. After a while, it will start to become natural and you'll just 'know' if something is a 'good design' - because this kind of mental practice will have turned it into a subconscious skill.

Here is a classic on the topic, beautifully presented.