Scenario You currently volunteer for a nonprofit organization

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Scenario

You currently volunteer for a nonprofit organization. Because you stated on your volunteer application that you enjoy designing marketing tools and participating in outreach events, the director of advancement has asked you to help prepare materials for an open-house event next weekend. Your goal is to leverage technology to produce various visuals that communicate the organization’s mission and appeal to its target audience.

Specifically, the director would like you to prepare one visual for advertising the organization’s participation in the open house and one visual that you can hand out to visitors at your booth. The visuals should be able to stand alone as well as speak to one another to tell a story. The director assures you that she will provide any materials you may need to effectively deliver your visuals.

Because you are not an employee of the organization, the director is expecting to review your concept for the visuals prior to the open house. The director will ask you to discuss your design approach regarding how you created the visuals.

 

Directions

Choose a nonprofit organization that interests you. Research the nonprofit organization to gather information regarding its mission and target audience.

· Creative Brief: Use the information you gathered from the nonprofit organization to formulate your design approach for creating each visual for the open house. Before you begin conceptualizing the visuals, the director sends you a link to the organization’s media directory that contains a number of tools and technologies that the organization has licenses for to create your visuals. You should choose two tools from the directory that you will use to create your visuals. The director has asked you to use a different tool or technology for each visual. To present your plan to the director, prepare a creative brief that outlines your concept for the open-house materials. In your brief, be sure to explicitly identify the organization, its mission, and its target audience. In addition, the director has asked you to address the following in your brief:

· Describe the visual communication tools and technology you will use to create each visual.

· Justify your selection of the visual communication-related tools and technology to create the visuals. Consider why this is the appropriate tool or technology in relation to achieving the project goal.

· Identify the appropriate delivery method for each visual.

· Briefly explain your reasoning for using each delivery method in regard to the organization and its audience.

· Visual Prototypes: In your brief, you should include a storyboard-style outline showcasing your visual prototypes. For instance, you might create a draft of an infographic, a commercial, a flyer, or a website using one or more of the tools in the directory. The director has clearly stated that this is not the final product that you would share for the open house, but rather a concept or draft used to receive feedback on. For your designs, you may use templates, but your prototypes must include context related to the project goal, the organization’s target audience, and its mission. Specifically, the director would like you to do the following:

· Use the selected technologies to create two visuals that align to the project goal. Be sure to include one or more images of each visual in the storyboard-style outline section of the creative brief to the director.

 

What to Submit

Every project has a deliverable or deliverables, which are the files that must be submitted before your project can be assessed. For this project, you must submit the following:

Creative Brief to the Director Your creative brief must include information regarding the organization and a storyboard that showcases two prototypes of the visuals you created. Each visual must clearly convey meaning with correct grammar and spelling and demonstrate an understanding of the audience and purpose. Cite all sources in APA format.

 

Supporting Materials

The following resource(s) may help support your work on the project:

Citation Help Need help citing your sources? Use the CfA Citation Guide and Citation Maker.

Document: Media Directory This directory provides a list of design tools to choose from to create visuals for the open-house event. Use this resource to access tutorials to learn how to use various tools and technologies.

Shapiro Library Resource: APA Style: Basics As you create visuals, it will be essential to provide credit for all images, videos, and text you use. Review this citation guide to learn how to properly cite text, images, and videos taken from other sources. This guide is intended to help you cite sources in APA style, avoid plagiarism, and search examples of APA style.

 

 

 

 

Creative BriefWhich Resources Can Help?Describes the visual communication tools and technology used to create each visual? Mastered ? Not Yet

· Unit Resources: Visual Communication Technology

Justifies each selection of the visual communication-related tools and technology used to create the visuals, considering why it is appropriate for achieving the project goal? Mastered ? Not Yet

· Unit Resources: Achieving Project Goals

Identifies the appropriate delivery method for each visual? Mastered ? Not Yet

· Unit Resources: Visual Communication Technology

Briefly explains reasoning for using each delivery method in regard to the organization and its audience? Mastered ? Not Yet

· Unit Resources: Fundamentals of Visual Communication

· Unit Resources: Achieving Project Goals

Visual PrototypesWhich Resources Can Help?Uses the selected technologies to create two visuals that align to the project goal and includes one or more images of each visual in the storyboard-style outline section of the creative brief to the director? Mastered ? Not Yet

· Unit Resources: Fundamentals of Visual Communication

· Unit Resources: Achieving Project Goals

GeneralWhich Resources Can Help?Clearly conveys meaning with correct grammar, sentence structure, and spelling; shows understanding of audience and purpose? Mastered ? Not Yet

· Academic Support

Lists sources where needed using citation methods with no major errors? Mastered ? Not Yet

· Citation Help

The Visual Minute: What is Visual Communication? - YouTube

Information Visualization – A Brief Introduction

1 year ago | 9 min read

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Have you ever thought about how much data flows past each of us in an ordinary day? From the newspaper you read at breakfast, to the e-mails you receive throughout the day, to the bank statements generated whenever you withdraw money or spend it, to the conversations we have, and so on?

There is a tidal wave of data associated with each aspect of our lives, and in addition to that personal data, there is data available on nearly every aspect of life.

Over the last few decades computing and the internet have revolutionized our ability to create, store and retrieve information on a whim. A global economy and instant communication have created an explosion in the volumes of data to which we are exposed. Yet, the amount of data leads to a large amount of possible confusion and decision paralysis. There’s more data available than we can comfortably process.

Information visualization, the art of representing data in a way that it is easy to understand and to manipulate, can help us make sense of information and thus make it useful in our lives. From business decision making to simple route  navigation  – there’s a huge (and growing) need for data to be presented so that it delivers value.

An Example of Everyday Information Visualization

This map, generated in Google maps, offers two simple ways of representing the route from Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand to the capital of Thailand, Bangkok, in the center of the country.

 Author/Copyright holder: Google, Inc. Copyright terms and licence: Fair Use.

The first representation consists of written instructions on how to go from Chiang Mai to Bangkok (as you can see it’s a pretty simple drive – though it’s worth noting that it would be more complex if we were to be moving between specific points within each city). The second representation is an image of the route itself imposed on a map.

Both representations represent value to different people. The first, the instructions, is highly useful to people who need to get from Chiang Mai to Bangkok directly. For example, a businessman going to a meeting.

The second, the map data on the other hand, could be really useful to a tourist who intends not to drive straight from A to B but rather wants to know “what’s on the way?” This lets the tourist look for potential break points in the journey and start to research what their options are in those places.

Both of these representations are examples of information visualization. The first relies on clear simple instructions and the minimum of graphical content – it conveys a simple set of useful instructions. The second conveys rather more data and in a visual form that allows for rapid cognitive processing to enables us to quickly digest the information we see.

Common Uses for Information Visualization

There are some very common uses for information visualization and these include:

Presentation (for Understanding or Persuasion)

“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.” Tess Flanders, Journalist and Editor, Syracuse Post Standard, 1911.

Journalists have known for a very long time that some ideas are simply too awkward to communicate in words and that a  visual representation  can help someone understand concepts that might otherwise be impossible to explain.

 Author/Copyright holder: Lablascovegmenu. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY 2.0

One of the most famous information visualizations in the world is the map of the London Underground. It is only a “map” in the loosest sense of the word; in that the geography above ground is very different to the way it is shown on the underground map. However, it enables pretty much anyone to quickly understand how to get from one point in London to any other using the underground system.

In simple terms, the underground map presents complex data for the purposes of understanding that data to make it useful.

There is a “dark side” to the presentation of information for understanding and it’s the presentation of information to persuade. There are “lies, damned lies and statistics” as the saying (usually attributed to Mark Twain but he attributed it to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli and there is no trace of Disraeli having said it – the saying has also been attributed to others) goes. By choosing what information to represent and what information to leave out – there are now “lies, damned lies and information visualizations”.

It is up to the presenter to decide where the ethical boundaries are in persuading people through information visualization. For example, you could show a graph that states “70% of people who use homeopathy feel better than those who don’t” but omit the fact that “70% of people who take a placebo feel better than those who don’t”.

Explorative Analysis

 Author/Copyright holder: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Copyright terms and licence: Public Domain.

The image above portrays the frequency of lung cancer within the United States by geographic region. Mapping disease data like this enables researchers to explore the relationship between a disease and geography. It’s important to note that this data doesn’t explain why there is a spike in cancer rates in the South East of the United States but it does indicate that there is a spike which is worthy of further investigation.

Explorative analysis through information visualization allows you to see where relationships in data may exist.

Confirmation Analysis

Information visualization can also be used to help confirm our understanding and analysis of data. For example, if you perceive a relationship between two stock prices, you can plot the data and see if the two are related.

 Author/Copyright holder: Arthena. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-SA 3.0

This graph (above) might be used to show the similarities in Brownian motion between sets of particles or it might be used to question the break in the relationship towards the end of the graph, for example.

The Take Away

Information visualization is designed to help us make sense out of data. It can be used to explore relationships between data, to confirm ideas we hold about data or to explain data in easy to digest manner. It may also be used, rightly or wrongly, to help persuade someone with data.

As the volume of data available to us increases exponentially in every field of endeavor – information visualization is becoming increasingly important as a skill in the workplace and in academia.

References and Resources

Course: Information Visualization: https://www.interaction-design.org/courses/information-visualization-infovis

Tess Flanders’s original quote was printed in "Speakers Give Sound Advice", Syracuse Post Standard (page 18). March 28, 1911.

You can find some beautiful examples of information visualization here -  http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

Hero Image: Author/Copyright holder: david. Copyright terms and licence: CC BY-NC 2.0

The Art of Visual Storytelling: Queen City Project at TEDxCincy - YouTube