Final Manga Infographic and Environmental Graphic Pieces

I promised that I’ll post up the latest pieces I have done from my Portfolio Development module, with the Infographic and Environmental Graphic assignments.

With the final infographic I have done, I scanned in all the mangas I own, and believe me, it took hours since my printer/scanner was taking forever. Anyways, I created symbols to simplify the categories using simple shape and line tools on Illustrator, and altered the layout by making it more of a bar graph format with the tallying of the books.

In the end, I was really pleased with the outcome and found that it was quite visually appealing, especially with the combination of bright colours coming from the covers.

And this is the final

For the Environmental Graphic assignment, I made a couple of changes, not major but enough that covered the feedback I was given.

Final environmental graphic works

Apologies they are not in image form on this blog post. It will just take forever to upload every one of them. But I hope you like it : )

New Infographic & Updates on Other Stuff

I have done the next stage of my information graphic. Personally, I’m still with my first idea. I find the new one is too wordy and the images don’t scream at you as I feel they should. We’ll see how it goes in tomorrow’s (or later this morning) lesson. But for now, here’s what I have done, the new-infographic. There are spelling mistakes which I realised after printing out, and I’ll make the changes if used as a final. I would have done a jpeg here, but you wouldn’t be able to read anything.

I have done basically everything I was told to do: name genres, artists, number of mangas from each title exactly, a description of the manga (which was really hard to do in the most simplest format without giving too much away — and what I wrote is the simplest way to describe each of them!). It was also suggested and asked if there are any crossovers between the mangas, which there are in plentiful, especially in CLAMP’s works, but there’s not enough room to do that… This document in viewing mode is A1 size (print out has been shrunk to A2) as I couldn’t fit everything on there properly (the previous design was shrunk from A2 to A3).

Anyways, it would be interesting to know people’s take on it, if it gives too much, does it make you want to read any of them, or it’s ok etc etc. But I just don’t feel it’s an infographic anymore…

The only thing you would gather from it all is that I’m a fan of CLAMP‘s work. Although I don’t have all of their mangas, I’m planning one day to own them all. But if you decide to look up on the artworks of each title I own, you could guess that the reason I chose these mangas was because I’m a sucker for what I consider to be beautiful art works in the manga world.

Well, that’s all for infographics. My next assignment is environmental graphics which has to be based on education and the university I’m in, but I’ll talk about that another day. As for my stop motion animation, I’m getting all the props ready (bought some little doll house pieces from a crafts shop the other day especially for this project so I better get something good out of it, hahaha!). I have done a couple of background stuff and just got to do a few more then I can start the whole thing : )

As for Professional Design Practice, we have been doing a team project the last couple of weeks and will be doing a presentation in lesson. As for the Case Study we are doing, I’m waiting for my contact to get back to me for the answers to my questions. I just hope the email was received since it’s been slightly over a week now. If by tomorrow evening there hasn’t been a reply, gonna email again to see what has happened.

Manga Infographic

I haven’t mentioned any other projects I have been working on. A while back I mentioned that we have an Infographics project. One of the choices given was to base it on a personal collection. With this, I decided to base it on my anime and manga collection.

There was a lot, more than what I listed on my last post, and overall the total came to 524+ as some I can’t/don’t want to reach height wise and dust-wise.

But in the end, I decided to focus on my manga collection as that reflected a main part of my love for the stuff. I counted 30 titles in total and here they are in order by amount:

Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle (28) complete

Fushigi Yugi: The Mysterious Play (18) complete

RG Veda (9)

Fushigi Yugi: Genbu Kaiden (9)

Rurouni Kenshin (8)

DearS (8) complete

Othello (7) complete

xxxHolic (7)

Tokyo Babylon (7) complete

Kobato (5)

Wish (4) complete

Gunsmith Cats (4) complete

Card Captor Sakura (3)

Suki: A Like Story (3) complete

CLAMP School Paranormal Investigators (3) complete

Sailor Moon (3)

GATE 7 (2)

CLAMP School Detectives (2)

Man of Many Faces (2) complete

Chobits (2) complete

CLAMP School Defenders: Duklyon (2) complete

CLAMP no Kiseki (2)

Sailor V (2) complete

Tokyo Mew Mew (2)

X (1)

The One I Love (1) complete

Clover (1) complete

Legend of Chun Hyang (1) complete

Miyuki-Chan in Wonderland (1) complete

Shirahime-Syo (1) complete

Cool list, right? Anyways, these are the books in two lovely pictures, with the first photograph dedicated to my favourite manga artists/group, CLAMP, and the second photo with various artists. And in case you wonder how I managed to fit them all and capture them in the photographs, I had to place them on my parents’ bed and go onto the top step of a small ladder.

As I had quite a lot of titles and have been researching on infographics, I found a particular design which I found really interesting. It is a typographic information graphic, which focused on words used in toy adverts for girls (there is also a boy’s version). Both designs displayed words that are used on the toy adverts, and recorded the amount of times that certain word came up. The more a word was used, the bigger it was in the infographic and the less used words, smaller size.

I thought of conducting a similar manner with the manga collection. At first I was thinking of recording the Japanese honorifics used in the mangas, but it would have taken too long to read all the books and record the many terms used. So I stuck to the titles, as they’re quite a bundle really when grouped together.

So the idea came to the more manga I have based on a particular title, the bigger it was and got smaller as fewer numbers of each title came. And for the past week with endless late nights staying up til 1am, 2:30am, and 4am extracting the titles from the backgrounds, cleaning them up and making them look pretty, I was happy with the end result.

These are the titles scanned so you can see them in closer detail:

And here is the final:

The reason it’s in black is because the main title, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle, could not be seen on white. Also, all of the titles are well contrasted against it.

Personally I think it’s really pretty and colourful and the titles help to express each manga in its own way : )

The only thing I’m really wishing now is that when I show it to my tutor tomorrow he won’t tell me to redo it using an ordinary typeface. I swear I’ll be really, really, really upset after all the sleepless nights I have been through!

*Edit @ 23:15 on 23/04/2012: Had class today and I have to change my idea. I was a bit annoyed, but I understood the reasons as to why I should change the idea, which is as a person who may not understand manga whereas I do, a viewer may not know what the infographic is about and just see a bunch of titles/logos.

I have sketched out another completely different idea, reflecting my manga collection, and other subcategories to go with it. I have shown it to my tutor and it seems the idea has been agreed. I’m gonna start the idea sometime this week but for now I am going to bed to catch up on more sleep after waking up from sleeping on the sofa!