Lawncare Decision Graphic

Our goal for the Lawncare Decision Graphic was to visually instruct a "lawncare professional" as to what fertilizer to use, based on the weather and soil conditions.  It was essential that the graphic could be understood by individuals who were not able to read English, or even by those who could not read at all.

The path I chose to take was to organize the different criteria on a horizontal axis, but to stack them one on top of another.  I think this provides for an easily understandable visual representation of the criteria.  For dry soil, I chose the sun icon; for wet soil, I chose clouds with rain; for pests, I drew a diagram of an insect; for temperature variable, I drew small thermometers.  Overall, I think it would be easy to decipher these representations for what they were intended to mean: the sun for dry soil, rain for moist soil, thermometer for temperature, and insect for pest infestation.  One problem, however, could be the mistaking of the sun and rain icons for weather conditions rather than soil consistency.  Overall I think my graph gets the point across, though.

I wanted the icons I utilized to appear as uniform as possible, so I sketched each sun one after another; I used the same technique with the insect, clouds, and thermometers.  This assignment helped me to think in purely visual ways to convey a message using pictures alone rather than words.  It made me focus on the pictorial sense of what needed to be conveyed, and I think what I was most able to take away from this drawing was communicating through symbols alone.

Collage

There were several similarities and differences between what I noticed about my collage versus what others noticed.  When we were instructed to choose as many pictures in ten minutes that stood out to us, I chose what I found to be most visually stimulating.  My choices would no doubt have been different had I brought my own magazines, and my limited choices definitely affected the final product (but not necessarily negatively).  

Others pointed out ideas such as my collage not necessarily being coherent with regard to subject matter. This is true; there is no common theme in the subjects of the pictures I chose.  This is essentially because I chose images whose colors appealed to me, rather than what was being depicted.  Another theme that came up was the fact that there are several abstract patterns rather concrete images; this goes with the fact  I chose images based on visual appeal rather than subject matter.

I also noticed that most of my images are large in size and spaced closely together, often overlapping.  This additionally was pointed out by viewers.  Generally, my own list coincided with things that others noticed, especially regarding the strong presence of abstracted patterns, colors, and shapes.