Design Research Dissertation - Visual Publication

 

Kyra Binti Rizal Hamzah / 0337085 /Design Research Dissertation / March-July 2021

Week 9

After completing the draft of the dissertation, it was time to endlessly scroll on dribbble to find inspiration, then get to work on the visual design for the dissertation. (References and style guide below)

I wanted to keep my design style fairly minimal and somewhat resembling what you would see in a typical mobile UI (white backgrounds, round corners, simple iconography, and such). Besides that, I wanted to bring in some bright colours as a way to express the debate around abstract designs (within animation in UI) without it conflicting too much with the minimal style I also had in mind. For illustrations in the publication ( I decided against using photos but still needed some sort of visuals to fill in spaces) I plan to use a combination of 1. icons similar to those you'd find in a mobile app (eg. switches, eye icons, x to close, hamburger menu icons, magnifying glass to search) and 2. shapes and lines resembling motion paths one might find in an animation software, to bring the work of designers as this research aimed to study, into the design itself.

Week 10

My first draft of my visual publication was a bit of a mess. At this point I hadn't put any figures in yet, as I was still wrapping my head around how to arrange my text and page layouts. 

The feedback I received for this was:

• Make the colors flow better between each section (rather than have it go from purple pages to yellow for example, you can make it flow with more similar colours like from purple to blue)
• Find some inspiration for infographic / data visualisation
• Play around with the cover design more

Week 11

Following the feedback from last week, I decided to do some research on visualising my data - some things from the questionnaire portion of the research could easily be displayed with a pie chart (multiple choice questions) and I already had pie charts of them auto-generated by google forms, so for those I simply re-created them following the colour palette and fonts I used in the rest of the publication design to give it some congruence. 

Original visualisation of responses to multiple choice questions generated by Google Forms

Redesigned pie chart 

The one part I had a lot of trouble trying to visualise was the likert scale data, so I searched around for some ideas and stumbled upon this article 

This layout I found in in the article looked like the best way to arrange it given the variables I had in my likert scales

Original visualisation of likert scale data, generated by Google Sheets

Redesigned likert scale visualisation

Finally, for the data from the visual analysis, I decided that rather than redesigning it entirely, it would suffice to change the color scheme and fonts used in the original Google Sheet as the data was already visualised in a table that was okay as is. 

Initial data visualisation of visual analysis portion of the research

Recoloured version of the visual analysis data table

Week 12

Version 1 of my full design. 

I still had a few edits to make like the kerning and the changes to the content based on Dr Yati's comments, so this was not the finalised version just yet.

Week 13

Feedback:

• add a blank page before acknowledgements (in the first version the copyright and acknowledgements were within the same spread)
• fix leading and color in abstract (text was a bit hard to read due to the colour choice on the page itself
• lighten the purple in the table of contents page
• try make lines in tables white instead of black (note - i was unable to do this without recreating the entire table by manually creating individual rectangles; i made my tables using the table tool in my publishing design software)
• add more emphasis in conclusion (note - i could not really pinpoint one part of the conclusion worth highlighting as i touched on a few points in it, so i did not make this change either)

Final Publication Design