I’ve mostly been talking about my Design Seminar class with Dick Buchanan and my Interaction and Visual Interface Design with John Zimmerman because those classes involve more discussion of ideas, which are easier to write about.

My other two classes, Design Studio with Dan Boyarski and Graduate Type with Karen Moyer (and later Kristin Hughes), are studio classes where the focus is on producing work for critique.

Data as Self-Portrait

In Dan’s class we’re tracking data about ourselves over a seven-day period. We are going to explore visualizing this data as a form of self-portrait.

I collected data about my daily communications: email (sent, received, and spam for three different accounts), IM (sent, received), phone calls (outgoing, incoming), text messages (sent, received), and hours per day in front of a computer.

Type as Self-Portrait

On a similar vein, in grad type we were given a construct, “I used to _________, but now I don’t”to create a typographic self-portrait using our constructions in a 10×10 space.

i-used-to-v1.jpgi-used-to-v2.jpgi-used-to-v3.jpg
These are in the order that I created them. Despite the text being all over the place, I felt the design was too conservative to represent who I really am. I moved to a more organic shape that plays with line breaks in a poetic way and has a sense of movement. The last one is a greater attempt to experiment.

My classmates seemed to like the first the best, with noted problems. I kind of like the middle for its poetics. But some said they liked the last. Design is subjective.

Next week we will explore using the same content for an accordian-type book. But I plan to continue working on these.

If you have any feedback, I’d love to hear it.