(B8) Social Media: Talk with Peg, Spread Development

EMAIL COMMENT FROM NICK:

I was thinking, we chatted about your collab project last week and about it just being mysterious thing without too much of an explanation. I think that should still be the case, but maybe there is some kind of (data like) index at the back so somebody can find out what is going on if they want to.

- Think this could be a really fun idea to play with, would provide a hint for the audience to be able to find more info but isn't an instruction that they have to do so.

CALL WITH PEG:

Polarity, play with the ideas and bulk out the section

- Needing more work. 

Index calendar, could have an overview 'yearly' calendar spread. Tiny images on a page, links back to Trevor Paglen work.

Relating to what Nick said about having an index at the end, could use more of a bibliography referencing where the content is from so people could find it if they wanted.

- What does this mean in terms of google map locations and girl's instagram account? Need to be considerate of ethics here.

- Could paste URLs for the Bibliography

Peg struggling with CCTV footage, what to do

- make fisheye/find fisheye

- Reminds us of Big Brother, full spread

Work on spread with google street view, google map, and wikipedia text.

- Think of ways to refine the page, make it look more considered.

- Could try and emulate the arrangement of the left hand page with the text?

Peg's caption text: 

Like the organisation model, could maybe make less repetitive by having the captions for those posts be alphabetised on the page

- keeps the interest a little more as each spread will have a different layout/words but presented in the same order

- It's also more representative of each month

Having some issues figuring out the structure of the book, how each sections would be arranged, how we can make each section look visually different from one another

- One idea was to assign each section with a typeface so that there would be both a variation in visual language to make it feel more representative of the wealth of information online, but also act as a signifier to the reader that a different topic is being visualised

- Talked and realised that not each experiment within the sections would work best with the same typeface, some experiments lend itself better to a digital typeface whereas some may benefit from a more traditional serif or common rounded sans serif

- It's going to be a case of looking at each spread individually, designing them based on what each spread is trying to communicate and then re-structuring the book in a sense that works visually

- Could also test categorise either each section or each experiment with CCTV image full bleed spread, however not sure this will work in some cases as there are different sections within one spread etc. It will be a case by case situation

DEVELOPING SPREADS:

Working on this spread (right hand page)

What to do with text to make it more interesting/visually engaging?

Fully justifying text and adding ad background layer to rabbit hole imagery page.

Full bleed text in the background makes it very crowded, feels very chaotic. Is this a bad thing? Becomes rather distracting next to the page with all the dates. 

Here made it much smaller so isn't as in your face, this is nice but I think it looks a bit strange as to why it's only covering a portion of the page. 

Tried having it as its own page of text, works well I think the digital typeface adds a visual strongly connected to digital space. It reminds me of coding.

Here using times, communicates something quite different to the digital typeface but I don't think it's worse, it's just different. 

Could maybe do an image search relating to these dates instead of gathering more text content to place alongside the data page. It would be good to keep the information together, I just think it needs some refining. 

Left with random imagery placement of images relating to events that took place on the days celebrities hit their highest number of searching.

- Links to tangents

- Links to rabbit holes. 

Working on the spread peg mentioned in talk this morning:

Thinking could make the background black, bring text to the foreground a little more.

What isn't sitting right is the placement of the text, it feels very thrown together, could make it more visually cohesive by representing the layout of the left hand page within the text.

Adding the black background, it really ties the two pages together, helps the audience understand they're commenting on the same thing, altered the text so the bulk is in a serif italic but the words that were to be hyperlinked (on wikipedia) are in a sans serif, bringing attention to the differences.

Swapping the pages around, to be doesn't look as well balanced, breaking up the text in this way also isn't super successful, it looks messy and ill considered. 

Altering the text to be jagged like the left hand page. This to me feels better, it doesn't impose itself too much on the left hand page but is more interesting to look at.

The breaks in the page are where there's a "hyperlinked" word.  

Half of the text on the left and the remainder on the right.

The balance here feels off, it's too heavily weighted to the left with lots of space on the right, could move some of the text so more is on the right hand page. 

This one brings the two together in a way that's more balanced.

Does the text work on these pages or would it be more appropriate to have on the rabbit hole pages with the wikipedia imagery collected from this pop up?

Adding to rabbit hole image pages.

I think this makes the page much more busy distracting and doesn't communicate as well as when it's on the google maps pages. It adds more to those pages than it does here. 

I like the white text over the imagery, perhaps this could be used somewhere else in the project on a less chaotic image? 

Underlining the "hyperlinked" text, has a stronger visual connection to the reason they're different and also helps the audience notice the differences between text. 

Need to apply these to the other google maps spreads:

Visually similar image results:

'Shrubland, scrubland, scrub, brush, or bush is a plant community characterized by vegetation dominated by shrubs, often also including grasses, herbs, and geophytes. Shrubland may either occur naturally or be the result of human activity. It may be the mature vegetation type in a particular region and remain stable over time, or a transitional community that occurs temporarily as the result of a disturbance, such as fire. '

Same treatment applied, works well, same impact as previous spread. Do we want to have another page that contains imagery from the hyperlinks?
- Something to consider.

What do I need to work on?

• Develop more pages with visually similar image search content, these are really successful and would be good to have more of (also if french folding they'll look less like an anomaly).
• Cover ideas
  - Show all content?
  - Show specific spread
• Index/bibliography
  - should this mean the numbers are then paged so there is a way of figuring out the content? 
  - What to show in index? Image information of its origin, information about the content, where it was found, references.