December 10, 2017
After meeting to discuss ideas, this is the first draft Jess and I came up with:
As Jess mentions in her blog, we settled for a breakfast map since many WPI students tend to go out for breakfast, as it is generally the cheapest meal to eat at a restaurant. Our audience for this map is WPI students who either live on or near campus and do not have a car, hence us mapping the bike routes. All the shown breakfast places are under a mile from WPI and take no more than 10 minutes to bike to. We currently do not have a scale or measure of distances on this map, which is something we can consider adding to the final draft.
While we did tailor this map for biking purposes, since WPI has a bike share program and many WPI students own a bike/skateboard/super cool motorized skateboard, the bike routes could also be used as walking routes. The caveat to this approach is that the time it would take to get to these places would be doubled.
To this map we also added the relative costs of breakfast at each location. As college students, we are always looking to spend a lot of money, so we felt that this would be a vital piece of information to add. The varying colors of the coffee cups show the different costs, but the colors of the cups are something Jess and I are looking for feedback on. In Kimball's paper about Booth's London maps, he discusses how Booth employment of color deviates from the norm at that time. Booth chooses to use different "happy" colors to show the varying wealth across London, while most authors at that time used only one color but varied the shades. Here, we chose to use colors in a similar family, but did chose distinctly different colors. They do read as feminine, something we were struggling with, as we feel that females do tend to go out to breakfast more often, but with the working title coming off as masculine, we are still debating this design choice.
We also included pictures, from each respective establishment's website, of the food served. We felt that this would appeal to the reader's senses, since if we see food that looks tasty, we are more likely to want to try it.
After meeting to discuss ideas, this is the first draft Jess and I came up with:
As Jess mentions in her blog, we settled for a breakfast map since many WPI students tend to go out for breakfast, as it is generally the cheapest meal to eat at a restaurant. Our audience for this map is WPI students who either live on or near campus and do not have a car, hence us mapping the bike routes. All the shown breakfast places are under a mile from WPI and take no more than 10 minutes to bike to. We currently do not have a scale or measure of distances on this map, which is something we can consider adding to the final draft.
While we did tailor this map for biking purposes, since WPI has a bike share program and many WPI students own a bike/skateboard/super cool motorized skateboard, the bike routes could also be used as walking routes. The caveat to this approach is that the time it would take to get to these places would be doubled.
To this map we also added the relative costs of breakfast at each location. As college students, we are always looking to spend a lot of money, so we felt that this would be a vital piece of information to add. The varying colors of the coffee cups show the different costs, but the colors of the cups are something Jess and I are looking for feedback on. In Kimball's paper about Booth's London maps, he discusses how Booth employment of color deviates from the norm at that time. Booth chooses to use different "happy" colors to show the varying wealth across London, while most authors at that time used only one color but varied the shades. Here, we chose to use colors in a similar family, but did chose distinctly different colors. They do read as feminine, something we were struggling with, as we feel that females do tend to go out to breakfast more often, but with the working title coming off as masculine, we are still debating this design choice.
We also included pictures, from each respective establishment's website, of the food served. We felt that this would appeal to the reader's senses, since if we see food that looks tasty, we are more likely to want to try it.
I'm glad you brought up the Kimball's paper. Our color choice was something we were originally questioned on in one of the comments on an earlier draft of ours as we had the meaning of the more blue toned cup switched with that of the red toned cup. I think we originally chose the colors and meanings arbitrarily (I know...not a good thing for a visual rhetoric class). However, one of our class mates suggested that we change it so that the red toned cup symbolize a more expensive restraunant because red is typically associated with caution. However, the Kimball's analysis of the Booth's map almost inspire me to flip them back. Wild, I know, but in his analysis he does say that Booth deviates from the norm, but only to further his point and purpose of making the problem of poverty seem manageable. Therefore, if we were to specify our purpose to encouraging WPI students to go out and spend money at local businesses, the blue cup would be more welcoming and more like go which would then communicate to that we are trying to encourage our audience to the more expensive restaraunts and feed more into the local economy. Therefore, I think our color choices on the cups depends upon the perspective of which we are making this map. Are we trying to get WPI students to try new breakfast places to broaden their horizons and make the area around WPI seem more appetizing(I think our current purpose)? Or are we trying to bring more funds to Worcester local businesses by targeting a specific audience(a purpose that would be still satisfied by this map)? When it comes down to it, I think color choices like these are going to dictate our purpose and therefore, most be chosen after great consideration because one little change can make a world of difference and we want to use our purpose to control our map not the other way around.
ReplyDeleteI do agree that we might need to narrow down our purpose. I didn't think of our map being used as a means of attracting more WPI business to local breakfast areas, which something that we could consider. I think after class today, our color choices of a "puke" green and sepia definitely deter away from this purpose, skewing it more towards where can I get caffeine and where can I get some greasy breakfast.
DeleteI'm glad that you guys are thinking carefully about your color choices. When I viewed your map during class on Monday, I had a different perspective on your use of colored cups to represent the price of eating at the various restaurants. I think that the colors have no clear connection to what you are trying to convey. While your color choices are clearly well thought-out, using three different colors to represent increasing amounts of cost is not a natural connection. Reading your map, it is absolutely necessary that I carefully regard the legend in order to be able to interpret the cost information in the map. If you instead used a color scale consisting of lighter and darker shades of the same color, I would be able to understand which cups are indicating "more" and "less" cost by the shading, and would only need to be told that the shading represented cost. Better yet, perhaps you could do away with the use of color to represent price entirely, and instead use the system that I have seen in many places where a number of dollar signs are used to indicate price--more dollar signs equals more expensive. As a viewer of your map, I would understand this system completely even if the legend were absent from the map.
DeleteIn short--it's important to convey information in a way that is natural to the audience, and assigning three different colors to the three different price ranges seems artificial--the audience would not be able to guess which color meant what.