Information Design- Project 1 & 2

21/1/20-23/2/20
Kyra Binti Rizal Hamzah (0337085)
Information Design (Individual Projects)

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Week 3

This week we started Project 1- A recipe infographic poster. I decided to do cold brew coffee for mine. It's fairly simple, but I chose it cause a) I had my coffee right in front of me as I was brainstorming in class, b) I feel like people don't realise how easy it is to make and buy it instead. I know I didn't at first, and that's evident from how empty my wallet was last sem due to my frequent trips to the Starbucks and Maison De Gigi on campus between classes. and c)it doesn't need any snobby fancy coffee equipment. Anyways, why I chose this isn't so important. On to the actual progress and development. 

I started by noting down the recipe in point form. After that, I sketched some initial ideas for my poster. I had 3 ideas to start with;

1- A french press, with the coffee and water floating as seperate layers in between the jug part and the press part.

2- Water and coffee beans being poured into a glass. (I scrapped this cause it didn't look like I could fit the recipe part into it nicely based on my thumbnail sketch.) 

3- Water and coffee beans swirling into a glass, inspired by a very vague memory of a Milo ad.

After that, I chunked the recipe steps.

 Then, I sketched the two thumbnail sketches from before, but larger and with more detail. As you can see, I gave up on the french press idea. Once I sketched it, I felt like it looked like a burger. I don't think drinks should resemble burgers.

I  forgot to take progress screenshots in between. 0 to 100 real quick, here's my poster. Not pictured: The extensive amount of time I spent changing the background color.

Week 4

Storyboard time! I found a bunch of sticky notes, so I used those. The smaller stickies were notes of certain parts that I wanted to animate by moving the assets in and out of the frame, and I penned down the rest of my ideas for the animation.

Progress Screenshots

I figured out how to animate a door opening/closing, based on a different tutorial I found on Instagram that showed how to animate a simulated camera movement around 2D illustrated objects.

To make the timeline less cluttered and difficult to look through, I separated my video into 5 compositions which I later put together. It was still pretty cluttered, but it's something......

I struggled with one particular scene were the different ingredients were mixed in one jar, and my first attempt to animate it didn't come out looking the way I wanted. Watch my failure below!

I then replaced it with a different animation where instead of cups pouring into the jar are shown, the ingredients are just shown to be streaming into the jar, but that didn't look that appealing either.

Finally, I decided to include the way I had illustrated this same process in my poster within the video instead, and used trim paths to make it look like it was animating in and out.

Final video

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Reflection

Week 3- Mr Kannan and Mr Shamsul's Illustrator tutorials taught me a lot. Wow I know how to use art brushes now. I initially planned to individually copy/paste the coffee beans into my poster.

Week 4- I spent way too long animating scenes 2(pouring ingredients) and 4(fridge opening/closing). I wish I knew how to use after effects more effectively so that I can portray my ideas how I want. I will keep trying !!!!!!!! Jiayou future me
Week 6- I am now unsure whether it was smart or stupid of me to finish 80% of the animation before going to Japan. Now that the deadline's been extended... I have so much time .... I could have not pushed myself to do so much during week 4. I suppose now I can spend more time fine tuning it, but  I feel like my overall design for both the poster and video were very simple, and that there isn't much that can be done. Was it too simple? I tried to not have too much gratuitous visuals as that was something we learnt this semester that I feel like I did a lot of in the past, but now I fear that I've held back a bit too much instead.

[Final reflection]
It's now week 8 and I just watched my video again, to see it without the deadline dread that was present as I worked on it.  I do think that some parts can be improved on, but I'm mainly proud of myself for managing to illustrate all those assets despite my dismal Illustrator skills; maybe I'm getting a bit better at it. 

I still wonder if my poster is too plain. There's a fine line between minimal design and unfinished design (but I can't see it cause my glasses aren't on right now) but I like that instruction-wise I did cut to the chase; let this be an ode to all the lengthy recipe blog posts with extensive stories about the writer's lives that I had to speed-scroll through while finding a good cold brew coffee recipe to refer to.