In collaboration with Bradley’s Journalism department, the UX designers and the Journalism students joined together on a group project spanning the Spring 2024 semester. One Journalism student and one UX student would partner together to make an article visualization, where my journalism partner would write the essay, then I would provide visuals and format it into a visual medium.
This project was given to me in my Junior year as a part of our Topic of UX course, a class designed to teach, “data visualization, communication, graphical interfaces, and interactivity with abstract information and analysis.”
I served as the designer on this project, working in Figma, creating mockups, mood boards, and proving the graphical design for the article, while my partner was the journalist, writing the content, providing research and data, and conducting interviews. The article assigned was a casual, informative piece about the city of Peoria’s history in theater, and how Covid had a massive impact on its theater world. Our goal was to increase awareness of theater life in Peoria, emphasize the importance the city has been in the past to the performative arts, and to encourage both seasoned and amateur theater goers to return to the theater post-pandemic.
The project first began when my class was given a list of the journalism students we could work with and the topic that student wanted to cover in their article. While the list was long and varied, covering everything from alt rock to Pokémon, the topic I chose was one I felt like I had a more personal connection to. As someone who does improv theater at my college, I have grown a fondness for the medium of performative arts, not to mention the myriad of friends I have made in the department.
Once all topics were chosen and partners were matched, we then began our bi-weekly meetings between the designers and the journalist. Once every 2 weeks, the classes would come together to share progress on both ends, discuss questions, and share feedback. In the time between class meetings, designers could continue creating mockups and adding visuals, while the journalists could continue writing the article, researching, and collecting data.
Thankfully my journalism partner was solidly on the same page for the project. We wanted to make the visuals and tone feel more casual and upbeat, with the images being vibrant and popping.
I wanted to capture both the glamor of theater, as well as the homemade yet vibrant feel of a handmade play. With theater beings so varied and wild, it felt only natural to have our visuals match that same wild and put together tone. To do so, I eventually settled on a pop art and collage style look, with big images, vibrant colors, and a cut out paper look to the imagery.
Our first step was to create a mood board. While my partner was writing the draft of the opening, I made the mood board so I could test the visual style I was going for, as well as the colors, fonts, images, and buttons if the article needed to be interactive.
As a requirement for the project, we were instructed to make our own custom icon and display that in our mood board and article. Given how my topic covered both theater and the Covid pandemic, I figured it would be fun combining those ideas with one of theater’s most iconic images, the comedy and tragedy mask. I made the image in Illustrator, using glamorous colors associated with the world of theater - gold, red, and velvet.
The most difficult part of the process was creating the mask. I needed to make the head shape accurate to the proper tragedy mask, all while concealing the mouth with a surgical mask. The surgical mask itself was a designed challenge, with one of my main struggles being to give it definition and structure beyond looking like a black space on the face. The process took me several attempts of editing, feedback, and alterations until I eventually landed on a final design for the mood board.
Once my mood board was set and I had met with my journalist again, I began greyboxing the general layout I was thinking of for the various sections of the article. With this being my first time designing an article, I wanted to get some proper reference material to see how other articles layout their content and images. I researched and took reference from other article layouts that I found on sites like Behance, then began greyboxing my layout. Once it was done, we discussed our plans for page order, text length, and design.
With all of the set-up work done, it was time to begin designing. Unfortunately, due to conflicting and busy schedules, it became difficult for me to meet with my journalist and get their feedback on my work as well as get more information on the status of the article.
This communication barrier was daunting and lasted for some time. However, I knew I couldn’t panic. If communicating outside of class was going to be challenging, then I knew I needed to make our bi-weekly meetings really count. I made sure to really bury my nose down and try to make big strides in the project, all while creating various lists of questions and comments after each milestone. It was a successful strategy and meant that I could keep the project moving and advancing, even if I occasionally had to go back and alter some work.
As a result, my work also had to evolve and change with this strategy as well. There would be times where the section of content was far longer than I had anticipated, so I had to pivot my direction some of the sections were going in. But that’s just how the creative process goes. And more often than not, led to a better final result. For example, after one of my pivots, I came up with the idea of taking the focal point of each image, cutting it out, giving it a jagged outline, and applying a paper texture to it. This idea really brought home my idea of the visuals feeling like a scrapbook and overlapping onto each other.
I was even able to take this idea and apply it to how I presented the data in the article. Instead of just leaving the data as text, I made custom assets to turn these data points into images that I could place in the scene. This choice really helped the data stand out and feel a part of the visual theme I was creating.
Every time I made an advancement in my design or was given a new piece of the article to develop or change, it opened the door to expanding upon my ideas and developing the project even further.
Even near the end of development, I had spare time before the deadline; I wanted to experiment with animation. I came up with the idea of the icon I had created on a curtain with a playbill header, rising to reveal a myriad of old Peoria theater photos falling down from the scaffolding of a stage.
By the day of presentations, I was confident that we made a great article, with both captivating writing and vibrant and fun visuals. (My positive grade seems to concur with this statement!)
Despite our scheduling and communication issues, we were both able to pull through and deliver a great product. Just goes to show that even if communication on a project is hard, you just persevere, keep working the best you can, make changes when you have to, and see the project through.
