Image Developments (Practical CoP)

Blue highlight = essay research influence

Thoughts on Practical:

• Having chapters in individual pamphlets
  - collated together to become a collection of small books (thinking like mr men collection)
  - would be kept together in a container?
• Illustrations: Reading showed that line drawings were successful, perhaps outline the illustrations to see the impact.
  - Need to consider colour still, remember research mentioning colour making the document more engaging, increasing attention, encourages cognitive processing. (Colour helps us in memorizing certain information by increasing our attentional level. The more attention focused on certain stimuli, the more chances of the stimuli to be transferred to a more permanent memory storage. (Dzulkifli and Mustafar, 2013)
  - Remember what sophie said in observation about the more realistic the illustrations the better she learnt because she was able to recognise the elements (thinking back to andragogy principle of drawing on past knowledge). 
• Imagery needs to be considered with impacts of cognitive load in mind, 'Like many cognitive abilities, working memory is a finite resource that diminishes with exertion. (Jabr, 2013) - Make sure no excess cognition is being spent on unnecessary places
  - Think about 'streamlining' the illustrations like  (Godwin, Eng, Murray, and Fisher, 2019) in their children's book illustration study. 

Took this image:

And turned it into a line drawing:

And added it into the page.

Before: 

After:

The colour image works much better, grabs attention and creates interest.
- Line drawing is difficult to understand due to black and white only.
- What sophie said about the colour and slight realism of the illustration is highlighted when these elements are removed. 

What can I do?

- Other images have extra visuals that could be considered distracting
- Thinking about extraneous processing, how to reduce this by having key information presented in the image:
> (Godwin et al, 2019) Placing text and illustrations in close proximity could make a sense of competition between resources, this is more likely when illustrations contain irrelevant information. (Godwin, Eng, Murray, and Fisher, 2019. Book Design, Attention, and Reading Performance: Current Practices and Opportunities for Optimization. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, [online] Available at: https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10166669 [Accessed 3 August 2020].)

The sky background on this image isn't needed, also the red box outlining the text is rather distracting.

Ways to make this more cohesive with the rest of the book:

- remove blue sky background.

- Make text same as body text

- Remove red as it's distracting, experiment with different colours as well as no colour at all. 

Again here:
- Remove sky background
- Rethink the composition, how else apart from speech bubbles could the signs be presented?

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Original Traffic Light Image in Text:

Development:

Edited the image to look like this, changed the type to match the text in book.

Sits like this within the text.

- Looks odd with the transparent background, doesn't fit with the rest of the text.

- Feel it needs to have a background colour, would make it fit with the image next to it, strengthening the visual grid system. 

Edited the image to look like this.

- Blue background to assist in presenting the grid.

- White rectangles over text to highlight them without being too distracting (like the original red was).

- White background with black text will also be easier to read at the scale it'll be printed compared to the white text on red background on the original image (gestalt theory shows that that combination would be difficult as text would appear thinner, therefore harder to read). 

Works well within page when the image has a full colour background.

- Will the text be legible? Ask peers about this when print full test copy. 

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Original Image in Text:

Edited image:

White background, removed red lines from bubbles.

- clearer, less distracting without the red lines. 

- moved the signs closer to the centre of the image as they were cropped off in the original image. 

In text:

- Looked odd as the shape again wasn't the same as image above.

- Need to include background colour (use the same as traffic lights).

Background colour in image:

- Works better in the grid, but still looks strange with the speak bubbles, feel they could be designed more appropriately.

> Want to rethink the speech bubbles, the curves create an odd shape within the image. 
- Could move to the corners on the image, take up less room (currently the pole of the signs takes up a lot of room that isn't needed). 

Image edited to make speech bubbles different, more square different placement.

- Editing to develop background looks good, is convincing.

- The arrangement of the 'bubbles' looks really odd, rethink the placement to give the image more balance. 

This works much better within the layout, the balance is better and the concept is still easily understood. 

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Think about Graph:

What to do to make this more visually cohesive? 
- Need to find a way to represent the information that isn't as long, the aspect ratio of the page where this sits required it to be much smaller in length: