December 12, 2017

"The Hangover Map"

Jess and I met today to revise our final map. We received a lot of feedback during class. Here were some of the popular suggestions:

• Include the biking times to get from campus to the respective breakfast location. 
• Label the pictures on the side of the map so the reader will know where each came from.
• Change the color scheme - it is currently too "Mad Hatter"
• Give the map more hangover colors, such as a Sepia filter, while give the icons a refreshing color to symbolize regret to respite. 
• Use two different symbols to label the different breakfast places. Currently the coffee cups give the appearance  that each place is a quick "grab and go" breakfast place, while some are actually sit down restaurants. 
• Add humor to the map to further appeal to the reader.

After taking these thoughts into consideration, this is the final map we came up with:

We decided to change the fonts throughout the map to give it more of the diner feel that the pictures that border the map give. The image of the two girls at the bottom right further contributes to this theme (Jess and I were laughing when we found this image and thought that it was just perfect for what we were trying to accomplish). We changed the bike paths to wobbly lines to show that the bike ride to these locations won't be the best, which is also resembled by the puke green color we outlined the paths in. We added logos to label each of the locations rather than just naming them. We then added the logos and names of each establishment to the surrounding images. We changed our images to have a blue color scale, which resembles the refreshingness of water. Originally, we were going to add the URL to Gompei's gears, but we felt it made our map look too cluttered. 

Below is our artists statement:

“The Hangover Map” is a map intended to encourage an audience of WPI students to use the Gompei’s Gears bike program to explore breakfast restaurants near campus. The purpose of the project as a whole was to create a map that reimagines space. While we did decide to maintain a road perspective, the idea of using bikes, rather than cars, as a means of traveling from point A to point B redesigned the area around WPI. Our audience is WPI students who live on or near campus who do not have access to a car and yet are still interested in exploring the local area. We modeled our map after a 60s diner theme, reflected through our font choices and well as the border of pictures that surrounds our map. Our title and subtitle both use a 60s, neon sign font while our legend and picture captions use a diner menu style font. These fonts encourage our overall theme and unity of the map. We also use symbols as icons throughout our map to show the pricing of each breakfast location. A coffee cup represents locations that were “Grab N Go”s, since grabbing a coffee is often thought of as something quick and energizing. An octagon with a superimposed fork and knife is used for sit down breakfast spots. The octagon symbolizes that this location is somewhere the reader will need to stop at, with the fork and knife further emphasizing that the meal is not a quick fix as a coffee is. The background color choices of sepia and dark green reflect the muddled, groggy feeling of a hangover. This is then juxtaposed with the clean refreshing blue tones that outline each restaurant to show them as a beacon of hope to our hungover audience. The tones of the icons representing food gets closer to a clear blue as the meal prices become less expensive. This is because our audience, following the cliche of broke college students, are most interested in getting the most satisfying meal for their needs for the cheapest price. We utilize humor throughout the design by inclusion of beer bottles and a 1950 esque cartoon in the corner. This is intended to make the audience feel comfortable and trusting of our breakfast recommendations.