Changing Idea - Developing Trading Card Designs

While developing the content for the booklet of infographics I found my ideas were better suited to a box with a selection of objects, such as cards, a poster, some stamps etc. However while then developing the idea for this I found it difficult to get a continuity across the items and when I thought more about it I found I had lost the concept that was driving this project: that the less there is of something the more it should and is cherished and treasured.

Due to this realization I went back to the print and trading card idea. I would design lino prints then use the images from these to make trading cards. However I didn't leave behind what I researched and developed for the book/box ideas. I decided that within the trading cards there would be sets such as mammals, birds and butterflies (just to start, more such as marine animals, amphibians would be added later) and the first purchase of one of these sets would come with a map showing all the animals in the set as well as informing the audience which are more endangered and approximately where they can be found in the UK. I would also have information about each species on the back of the card.

I did some sketches and traced over these to develop what I wanted the art of each card to look like. I wanted each set to have a different theme, for the birds I wanted to simplify the image as much as possible to make bold simple motifs. Below shows the magpie card, as magpie's are common I used green as the background colour. I feel the areas of white worked particularly well, they add a bit of contrast to the image. When I made the puffin card I instinctively made it smaller and off center and because I felt this worked well I did the same with the magpie card.

For the mammals I wanted to focus on texture,looking at the species fur, for the sake of the tests I just used the photos I took but edited the levels.

The butterfly cards would just be line drawings to emphasis their fragility. I tried a variety of ways to show the line drawings for the trading cards but none particularly stood out, although I felt the lines in black were the least effective.

 

 I was unsatisfied with the cards, I felt the colours were too garish next to each other and they weren't subtle enough. However I needed to use tones of red, amber and green to show which animals were endangered. I knew many trading cards have a border and tried to just have the colour as an outline of the card, shown below. However this still didn't work.

I then thought I would have stages of colours,not just three, for the different IUCN criteria. When looking up the criteria again I found this chart on wikipedia:

I decided to use the font colour as a guide for the line colour and the circle colour for the background colour. The tests of these are below.

 I was a lot more pleased with these than the previous cards. However felt these were too dull and decided to use similar colours but a bit brighter. I then also made another change. I wanted the cards that were Least Concern up to Vulnerable to have the line darker than the background so it shows the species to have a stronger presence. Then have Critically Endangered and Endangered species to have lines lighter than the background to show they are disappearing. Below is a colour chart showing the stages in changing the colours as well as examples of the new colours. The first colour is the background colour, the second is the line colour.

I found that with the white and red for Critically Endangered made the species stand out more rather than make it look like its fading away. However I liked this, it fits with my idea that the less there is of something the more it is treasured or in this case the more noticeable it is. Tigers, polar bears etc are more well known because they are endangered so I liked the idea that although the white line suggests the animal is losing is presence, the contrast with the dark background shows the attention on it.The amber and endangered species are at risk but because they aren't critically endangered they aren't paid as much attention to and thus fade slightly more into the background.

I made adjustments to the colours as I went along, below is where I found the greens to not be contrasting enough so I made the background lighter and the line darker.

 The magpie and puffin were difficult because they had three colours so I experimented with changing the colours of the three different sections. I kept the outline of the magpie black as having it turquoise wasn't very effective. However as the puffin has an amber status I made the line orange to show it isn't endangered but is still vulnerable.

 

 

Self Defined Project - Research

As I probably won't be able to exhibit my prints I've decided to create a booklet/catalog that would have gone with the exhibit, using my prints to show the information I've collected. In order to help with this I researched into infographics and the use of paper in graphics as well. I also found some visual responses to endangered animals which will influence my work.

 

The piece above is some infographics about Endangered species around the world but its an example of one way of going about representing information. There is also a selection of stamps of British endangered species at this link.

In the book 'Information Design Workbook' by Kim Baer I found the following examples:

 

 The above is from the World Financial Center, I liked the way smaller images could be used to create one larger image. I thought I could try and use this to show that there are 25 Grey squirrels to every 1 red by making red squirrels out of Grey ones.

 

Above are two images by Nigel Holmes. I thought the first one packed a lot of information into one page and showed the information in a variety of ways. The monotone look of the piece is successful and may work well for me as the colour red (in relation to the IUCN Red List) is very important. The second piece is a simple but easy to take in way of showing numbers of things in a visual form. The repetition of images to show numbers is probably going to be a large part of my piece.

 The first piece below is on this website, it shows the frequency of certain words in the 5 holy books of the worlds major religions. While the one next to it is here and it shows the differences in frequency of changes made to wikipedia articles which give the impression of which ones are updates more regularly or which ones are an area of debate. Both these are less easy to read instantly but can involve the viewer for longer amounts of time in most cases.

 Then there are these pieces from Chris Jordan's 'Running the Numbers' which explores American culture using statistics. The first piece is Seurat's famous image shown with the number of cans used in the US every 30 seconds. The second is 2 million plastic bottles, the number used in the US every 5 minutes. These give a strong sense of the scale of the statistics at the point when the numbers become meaningless.

I then looked at the book 'The Power of Paper in Graphic Design' by Catharine Fishel for some examples of tactile elements I could add to the book.

 

Although I'm not doing trading cards anymore I thought there is always the option to add some cards to the book, in a small pocket or ones that could be ripped out. A nice example of cards is the piece above by Cheryl Kubo, I like the use of bright colours and the vibrance of them.  Next to this is a piece by Templin Brink Design which is a small book of stamp cut examples of work. I liked the stamp idea, especially making one large stamp of an endangered species and working in the same area making more but smaller stamps of more common species.

 

The piece above by Wagner Design made me consider using windows and cut outs as well as pull outs in my book. While the piece next to it by design firm Wink made me consider cutting pages into the shape of the British Isles or certain animals. 

The two pieces by Stefan Sagmeister (left) and Salvato, Coe + Gabor (right) made me continue to consider using cut outs in my book, especially as it emphasizes the idea that endangered or extinct means the animal will no longer be there. I like that Sagmeister's piece had the cut out going all the way through the book and this emphasizes the idea of unavailability.

Finally I looked at the book  'The Best Informational Diagrams' published by P I E Books. 

The first piece is by design firm Grundy and Northedge. I like the energy the images add to this piece, it makes you much more interested in the statistics. The images and the text work together instead of either one doing all the work. The piece next to it is another piece by Nigel Holmes, I feel I could use this piece as inspiration to create a map made of animals in the UK, with numbers coinciding with their vulnerability.

 

The last piece is by Eriko Hasumi, which relates strongly to my work as it involves animals. It's interesting to see one way of simply representing animals in order to make them part of a piece of infographics. 

Self Defined Project - British Endangered Animals

For our last project of year my idea was to link endangered animals with limited print runs. My aim was to create prints of some endangered animals as well as some more common animals for comparison and then print a number related to their population numbers. I also intended to create a series of trading cards based on this for a younger audience.

Originally this was going to be endangered animals around the world but then I wanted to specifically look at the UK as this is a less popular topic and brings it to the doorstep of my audience.

I researched endangered animals in the UK as well as trading cards/artist trading cards/mail art. It was difficult getting a consistent idea of what is endangered in the UK especially specific numbers.

I got a general overview of what is endangered from these websites:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2007/jun/29/endangeredspecies.conservationandendangeredspecies#/?picture=330127834&index=7
 
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/the-10-most-endangered-species-in-britain-414113.html

http://www.animalcorner.co.uk/endangered/bi_mammals.html

I looked up the overall status of each animal on the IUCN Redlist.

I decided to visit the New Forest Wildlife Center as it has a few of the common and endangered species that were coming up in my searches. Below are some of the photos I took there:

I then needed to get more exact numbers to be able to visually communicate the vulnerability of each animal. I also felt at this point that I wanted to leave the trading card aspect and move into more of an exhibit of the prints displayed in an almost infographic-y way. 

I found maps which gave locations and vague sighting information at the sites below:

http://data.nbn.org.uk/index_homepage/index.jsp

http://data.gbif.org/welcome.htm

However in the end I was able to find a very detailed study that took place 6 years ago which gave approximate numbers, as well as locations, of many British Mammals, Birds, Butterflies etc.

http://jncc.defra.gov.uk/page-4063

Final Typeface

 

 

Above is my final typeface. When cutting out the letters I tried to add as much variety as possible while still trying to make everything clear. Variety is important as I wanted to show the physicality and the numerous ways the books could create these 8 bit fonts to illustrate that books are in many ways superior to e-readers. I cut through blank pages to revealing lines of text as well as the reverse of this. I cut into images to reveal either text or a blank page as well as cutting into the covers.

I tried to bring in the same variety when photographing the images. I really wanted to show depth and the book as an object that can be manipulated. I took images from different angles, I used the shadow and light created as well as trying to include the pages along with the letters.While photographing I was keeping in mind the work of Veronica Bailey whose work is shown below:

 

Her work really emphasises that books are objects and are beautiful and interesting in their own right.

 I'm pleased with the font as I feel it gets the message across. Although I find some letters are harder to make out than others but I feel this is less noticeable when they have the context of the letters around them, how they work on their own is a different issue. For the sake of fitting them all onto one sheet I had to crop some of the photos and I felt some pieces looked better with more space around the letter. With more time I would have liked to experiment more with how I could have cut the letters and ways of manipulating the books to make the images more interesting. As I went on photographing I had to come up with more and more different ways of shooting the letters and I think interesting results would have happened if I kept pushing this.