Thinking About Non-Linear Timelines
I began by noting down the events within my own history - from 1996 through to present. I then mapped out the books, films, and albums - placing them around their release time spatially, but linking them to my experience of them with leading lines. I also placed the locations as brackets around wider timeframes/events, to give experiences a sense of place. I may represent this in the final poster as the outline of the map areas surrounding or overlaying the other facts. Finally, I added any non-timed facts at the side - to make sure that I would not miss them out of the final composition. |
Ideas for Visually Representing Facts, Importance, and Time
In order to create more space to fit all of my facts onto the poster, and to present the idea that certain "facts" spanned over more than one timezone, I began imagining more abstract ways to visually represent them in my sketchbook. The immediate solution was to represent my locations as map shape - perhaps with iconic landmarks protruding from them to identify the places easily/identify what was important to me in those places. this would mean I could place the maps wherever I chose on the timeline/outside of the timeline and they would exist in a different dimension to the linearly tracked facts. I also sketched out another wavy timeline, in order to conserve space, however this time I also played with 3-D/perspective, making the closest point in time (most recent) at the forefront/larger and the oldest point much smaller and further away. In conjunction with this, I could resize the graphic representations of my facts. Another way I considered using size was as an indicator or importance: if something was particularly prevalent to my character, it would appear enlarged, whilst smaller, more inconsequential information would be smaller. This is an instant pre-attentive attribute that the viewer could understand without the need for a key. |
Step 1: Allocating a colour scheme and creating the basic structure.
I chose muted browns and oranges to represent the 60s/70s era of my preferred music and literature, that would also lend itself to the soft, illustrative nature of the icons/images that I intended to create. I began with the warped shape of the timeline/road and the outlines of map areas, choosing to keep them simple and graphic to contrast the plethora of illustrations and text that would be added around/within them. |
Step 2: "Rough" illustration and working out placement.
I mocked up the placement of where I wanted graphic representations of my facts to go using simple shapes in illustrator, and began adding text captions. This was an easy way to determine how much space I had to work with and relationships between facts/objects based on their size and placement. I also at this point decided to alter the perspective of the timeline and the maps - adding a drop shadow and removing the bottom halves of the map outlines so it appears that the timeline went through the locations and was stretching from the pas (small) to the present (large) on an almost 3-d axis (as I had illustrated in my sketches.) I think this added a nice depth to the poster, and helped to visually explain how the locations SURROUNDED my other listed experiences. |
Step 2 Cont. My sketchbook illustrations were created quickly using pencil and markers, to get onto paper the visual representations of my facts that i wanted to include. Not all 50 facts had visual counterparts, either due to it being a) impossible to portray, b) unnecessary in terms of their importance to me or c) to conserve space on the poster and prevent it from becoming too cluttered. I had not intended to ever use these sketches in the final product, as they are my rough working, however, when I presented my ideas to the group, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive about the illustration style of these images, and general consensus was that they should be included in my final work.
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Step 3: Digitising the Sketches
My original plan was to use the sketches as a template to create vector graphics from, however, from the feedback I had received, I wanted to retain some of the hand-drawn texture as it made the images more personal. I explored scanning in the images, and using vector masks to simply clean the edges and "crop" out the drawing with a smooth outline, however, it appeared too flat and did not allow me to play with the textures, shapes, and colours like I wanted to. I researched bringing hand-coloured illustration into Ai, and found a method that worked for me: Image Tracing with specific settings to capture colour and marks and vectorise them. I went through the painstaking process of photographing, image tracing, and then reshaping and combining the resultant vector "puzzle pieces" that made up each illustration, before tweaking colour palettes and grouping to create the final images. Some remained as vector shapes, simply copied into the final poster, however, the larger drawings were rasterised to stop my laptop from combusting at the sheer size of the files being used in tandem!.
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Step 4: Working out how to include all the information! Alternative title: learning when to abandon an idea.
Once some of my illustrations were placed, I started to realise how little room there would be to include all of the information that I had originally intended. I abandoned the idea of including every album cover/book cover/film shot as a visual, and instead drew inspiration from my line sketches, and McCandless intertwining "timeline" infographic from Information is Beautiful. I used the pen tool to create swooping curved lines, and typed on the paths created. For the novels that I wanted to include I used repeated, memorable quotes to make up the text paths. I thought this would be a nice way to demonstrate that the lines represented literature - as the timelines were physically formed from words in the book. In the case of The Shining this concept worked particularly well, with the iconic "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy" repeating over an over as it was typed in the story. I used typefaces that stylistically captured either the time period or an element of the novels: flowing handwritten script for Pride and Prejudice, a serif typewriter font for The Shining, Sans Art-Deco-eqsue lettering for The Great Gatsby and so on and so forth. I denoted the book title, author, and year of publication in the standard typeface and colours that were featured on the poster, to explain clearly to any viewer what these lines were representing. |