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
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.
