NMG Design
The Brief
During my last year at Columbia College Chicago, we were tasked with gathering information and presenting it in a cohesive and visually interesting format for a semester final project. I chose to observe the reading habits of people during my public transportation commute in Chicago, and put all of those findings into one book to present the data gathered.
CTA Book Data Project
Bachelor's at Columbia College Chicago
Spring 2024
Problem
The final project assignment was to use our data visualization skills that we practiced over the semester to present a final, fully rendered book of gathered data that we could choose. Taking this data, we were tasked with presenting the information in a cohesive and detailed format.
Design Intent
- Implement required content provided alongside data collected
- Create a visually compelling layout design featuring all relevant data
- Compare and analyze data to configure trends in book genre, time of day, train lines with the most readers, etc.
- Present data confidently and cohesively with the design chosen
Insight
Not only did this provide good practice in people-watching, I was also able to practice taking information from the world around me, collecting it, and present it in a consistent format that was also visually engaging. This project helped me to hone my skills in layout design and data gathering.
Outcome
A fully rendered book about books that has taken interesting data points and presented them in an effective way that immerses the viewer into the world of the data collection.
Layout Drafts
The final project ended up with a combination of these two layouts so as to keep the entirety of the book visually interesting where the information can be redundant.
I took spot colors from the CTA website to implement into the color palette of my project. I only ended up needing to use spots of the red, brown, and purple lines, while also using the gray for signage and accents.
Example vector used for the cover of the book.
The project included a requirement for representing the star rating system of the books chosen. I used the Chicago stars that are present on the city's flag to do this, which worked perfectly because nearly all of the titles I observed were below a 5-star rating.
Final Rendering
This is a general example of a finalized layout for the data taken. The placement of data was shuffled throughout the book to create more dynamic layouts as the information itself could get a bit redundant.
For any other important data that was not entirely consistent across all the points, it was condensed into pie charts shown near the end of the book. This also included an infographic of where these books might be found on my personal bookshelf if I owned them, since my bookshelf is categorized by genre.