'Making of' - Week 4

After getting a chance to look at everyone's second attempt at the map making task, I found it interesting to see how this time, people were a lot more experimental, and seemed to really stretch the meaning of the word 'map', which lead to some very creative outcomes. One that stood out to me was one that utilised symbolism and simple patterns in geometric shapes as appose to representational drawings of the areas themselves, so I interviewed the creator, Ling to ask her about her inspirations and her feelings towards it- 

I liked the use of symbolism and simple patterns in geometric shapes as appose to representational drawings of the areas themselves, what was the idea behind this?

For this map, I've incorporated the colour and iconography to represent my key moments. As you see the red hexagon is the university of Salford, green represented garden, yellow obviously indicated the tram and grey implied the imperial war museum

How does this differ from your first?

Compare to original map, this one seems more abstract because I have simplified the landmarks to make viewers think about it. The first map was just detail sketches that didn't have any meaning or technique behind.

Which one do you prefer and why?

I prefer second map because obviously, I've put more thoughts and techniques in it compare to original one

Which did you have more fun creating?

I would say second map has more fun creating because I played around with colours and geometry on the illustrator, created a visual communication with viewers

If you were to do this project again, which direction would you take it?

If I was going to do this map again, I would like to transform it into 3D map. I think that 3D map is more fun than 2d drawing and will attract more people

It was interesting to gain her thought process on how she came to the final idea, especially considering how much of a unique idea it was. I find many similarities in this and my initial mapping project, as neither map is concerned with the in-between moments of the journey, and instead symbolically represents the key moments that we wish to communicate. I am very interested in character design and caricatures, hence why I was keen to implement them into my first mapping project, and from her previous work, Ling appears to be very interested in drawing patterns and nature, so she has also explored her interests in this project, which shows by the way she had more fun making it.