DATA SHED - Initial Ideas

For this brief I have the opportunity to incorporate my style and own personal touches within the design. Initially the Data Shed is wanting 3 illustrations doing for the sliding feature as you can see below. They are wanting illustrations that are a bit quirky and different. They are a new start up company which is heavily tech based which can be quite frightening to people who have no idea about technology etc. so the illustrations have to bring some life and fun to the company. They need to draw in the audience whilst also being informative and playful.

As you can see the website looks pretty white and dull at the moment and definitely needs some life bringing to it. They are wanting to get rid of the stock imagery that is currently being used and replacing it with something allot more visual exciting and 'quirky' as essentially it is quite a crazy products.

The company offers various tools which help businesses analyze all their data. The data shed analyzes all

that data and presents it to the customer in the form of charts, stats and easy to understand figures. The point of the product is to help business and point out what aspects are affecting their sales, revenue etc.

They analyze all different types of data from how weather affects sales, to customer duplications etc. The amount of data that is used is quite impressive. I am really excited to work with data shed and have already come up with a few ideas of routes I could go down.

I have spoken with the Datashed this week and they will be emailing me a propper brief out as soon as possible, but things a pretty chaotic at Datashed at the moment so I should have it in the net few days. This will give me some stronger guidelines to work with as allot of the correspondence so far has been in person rather than in writing. I have a rough idea of what they are wanting but until I get the real brief I won't have strict rules to work to

INITIAL IDEAS

After speaking with Ed about the brief I went away and drew up some quick ideas which I think ties in well with company and also highlights the companies product in a fun and creative way. I wanted to try think of ways I could create visually interesting illustrations but also highlight the concept. I really liked the idea of taking the company name and working on this as the actual concept. I think the data shed is a brilliant name, and in fairness the software analyzes a shed load of data like a machine which then results in an easy to understand visual format for companies. I thought that creating some kind machine like shed would be perfect. I thought it would be great to have some kind of input output feature with the shed which shows the mass of data go in and a simple format for the output. As you can see above, these were my first ideas, I think using the shed for the imagery makes the product accessible to a wider audience, techy computer stuff sometimes puts people off so having something like shed gives a more human link.

I also came up with several other ideas. I wanted to think of imagery which I could work with. My concept for the company is that essentially there is a problem to solve and datashed put all the right pieces together, they do the hard the work and present it to the customer in a form they can understand. So with this in mind I thought of products and puzzles where essentially there is messy data to start with and then a finished resolved solution.

Here are some concepts I came up with:

The Rubix Cube : Hard to solve problem - could experiment with this object further?

Jigsaw - This could be a good bit of imagery to work with each puzzle piece could have symbols for different types of information on. This could be shown being put together in a way that the viewer can make sense of the bigger picture.

Data shed pieces : Could create the shed using different aspects of charts etc.

Data Cake : Ingredients - different information out come data chart cake

These were all playful ideas which I need to pitch to the company.

Digital Design

After having a vision of what I wanted to produce for one of the illustrations I sat down and bashed out my idea. I went with a subtle orange brown colour scheme as the Datasheds logo is quite a bold bright orange so the imagery was quite intense.

Here are the colours I have used for the design

Initial Shed Design

 I added the conveyer belt for an input output element to the design

which shows the data going in and a resolved outcome.

I wanted the Shed to look like an actual machine. I added cogs etc to make it look

more mechanical this represents the hard work and heavy lifiting of the data.

I struggled to think of what I could use to the represent data which they process.

I decided to go with a stream of numbers. And a charted outcome. I was not overly keen on

the data but it was a good start to work with.

FEEDBACK

I was pretty happy with the style of illustration and the general concept of the design. I sent the design over to Ed at the Datashed to see what he thought of my initial idea for one of the illustrations and I was really pleased with what he had to say about the design. But did have a few corrections for me.

Email from Datashed

Feedback Overview

I've shown the two images to Anna, and we both like the initial interpretation a lot. You've got it right, in that the datashed essentially takes in pretty much any data, does some heavy lifting, and turns the data into more than the sum of the original parts. From my perspective, I like the idea of a shed, because an engineer is usually much more pragmatic and down to earth, compared with typical IT people who never actually get anything useful done. We build things that last, and don't just talk about it.

A couple of initial thoughts on the 'shed':'

1. Data is generally hard to get at, and pretty dirty.. so perhaps the input isn't quite as clean as a single stream. To be honest, its usually a big dump of cr@p!

2. The outputs are generally analytics (basically forecasting an outcome, predicting something), data visualization (so charts, or interactive reporting tools, like http://thedatashed.azurewebsites.net/dashboard  or customer selections (so taking a load of categorized customer by sales performance, or likelihood to purchase something). 

3. Not sure if this could fit in the same image; but I think soemthing that's important is being able to give decent visual examples of how two or more sets of data could be combined to bring something valuable..... so bringing your sales figures together with your purchase and costs information gives you your profit, combining weather information with sales in your stores can help show why sales were so bad on a snowy day, facebook and twitter data can be combined with your information relating to a customer which gives you a much broader view of a customers likes and dislikes

Ed Thewlis

Director - Technology

 Alterations

After taking on board Eds feedback I got rid of the continuous stream of numbers and decided to create Icons which I thought represented the type of data that might be analyzed. This is a much better visual interpretation of the data. It also shows the diversity of analyzing various types of data and pulling it all together to create something that is simple and easy to understand for the customer.

Ed mentioned that usually the data is pretty hard to get at and is usually a big heap of rubbish so I got rid of the fluidity of the data input and created a pile of data which sums the company product up allot better than the stream of data.

I created a few different symbols to represent various types of data which could be included.

 Profit, customer profiles, web based data,

Sales figures, business details, weather, mail

Recent Versions

I think I like this version better with the box of everything you need to know. I think it looks more interesting than the chart version below. I have also managed to include the companies online brand font also.

 

I have sent these versions off to the data shed and am waiting to hear back from them with a more detailed brief as I have still to produce more illustrations.