Influence Map

After designing the initial map inspired by the influences of my assigned partner, I collected feedback and refined the design further. I focused on pushing the overarching design further in two ways: cohesiveness and communication. With the first version, I made the mistake of putting lots of time and effort into each section and barely any effort into the presentation of all these sections at once. I targeted that weakness this time around by taking copying and pasting the individual elements of each section (instead of exported jpegs) into one large canvas, where I then organized, edited, and built on these sections while keeping an eye on the entire canvas at the same time. This is how I went about creating a more cohesive design, tying all these sections together. As for communication, I wanted to communicate the connections between sections in a non-verbal way, with shape language and other intentional design choices. Though the individual categories are made clear with overlap and close proximity, the connections between categories are shown with the shapes (ovals x triangles, rectangles with sharp corners x round corners) and similar design choices applied to the labels. All in all, while this design wasn’t anything super out of my comfort zone, I took this version as an opportunity to refine it, be more intentional about my design choices, and test my understanding of the Gestalt principles in order to communicate in a heavily visual manner.