Case Studies
Morning Paper
Society consistently uses social media and online news platforms to access and receive news. However, timelines and content are now being altered and catered for users to keep them addicted and strung to social media. The main problem now is users across many different platforms will be receiving content that is not consistently accurate due to their catered timelines. That is why for this year’s capstone project, Morning Paper was developed to act as a moderator and tool for users to safely access their news across any social media or news platform. Whether it be on the website or the assistant, users can access the statistics Morning Paper provides at any time they need.
Morning Paper’s main tool is its news analytics and statistics. For each news topic, Morning Paper will select three of the best news sources from any news platform or journalist. For each of these sources, Morning Paper will provide a brief summary of the source, how accurate the source is and how much bias is present in the source. Users are able to toggle across all three sources to see the variety of how the news topic is being presented across different sources. If the user wants to read more on the source they can access it through the more information button. These sources are also shown in two different sizes. The largest size is breaking news and the rest being regular news.
Hotline Bling
Hotline Bling is an animated data visualization that showcases data from a person's calls throughout an entire year. The goal of this motion graphic was to bring life and personality to the data. Additionally, the motion graphic would provide interesting insights and information to the data as well. For this animated visualization, it was made to show the call duration, number of calls made and call type for each day of the week of that month. The types of calls vary from buddy outgoing/incoming and non-buddy outgoing/incoming calls. As shown in the motion graphic, the buddy calls are shown as blue circles and the non-buddy calls as red circles. Through these circles, the data can overlap and showcase variation in hues to provide insight into different days of the week.
Through coding on Processing, this initial data set was developed to map out two months' worth of data. The goal of this visualization was to map out the data symbolically by having it represent call towers and flowers blooming. To execute this, the line for each month was represented by how many calls were made for each day of the week. The call duration and call type for these days of the week were mapped out to the end of these lines to construct the visualization. Once all of this was executed, the visualization was able to represent the data and symbolic imagery effectively.
Stages of Stress
Stages of Stress is a motion piece that visually/metaphorically the stages of stress through a person. Throughout the motion piece, the protagonist is shown interacting with different elements to describe his level of stress. This piece makes stress visually recognizable as visual elements instead of a mood that resides within human’s heads. This piece is targeted towards young adults who go day to day in their earlier careers trying to make something out of themselves and have to undergo levels of stress every day. Through these ideas, the piece aims to bridge the outside and inside of someone’s mind who is emotionally torn by the different stages of stress.
Initially, symbolic elements were used to orchestrated and successfully convey the themes of stress within the motion piece. As a baseline, white and red were used as parallels to represent stability and stress. These two colours were used within the piece to show the protagonist’s interaction with their stress visually. For each stage of stress, the colours were attached to symbolic elements to further the ideation behind each stage. With these symbols being developed there was a clear style and direction that was needed for the development of the style frames.
