Epsilon Sigma Alpha (ESA), a philanthropic sorority, hosted the second annual “Fur Ball” dance, an animal themed event, in order to raise money for Muncie’s Animal Rescue Foundation (ARF), a local animal shelter with a “no-kill” policy.  The event was free and open to all, yet donations were accepted.

A dog bowl full of “puppy chow” snacks, a container for coin-donations and a photo of a dog sat on each table along with an information sheet for the dog, showing their name, habits and other photos.  T-shirts were being given away and a silent auction was held, featuring items such as coffee beans and Ball State paraphernalia.

Carly Kern, zoology major, dresses as a cat girl while talking about the event with others.

Brittany Brewer, an ESA member, danced along with the more than 100 other students who attended.  Last year was the first time the event was held.

“We thought ‘let’s have a dance to make money for [ARF]’ and then we wanted to make it an annual event, so we planned it again this year,” Brewer said.

Audreyalice Kubesch, an ESA member, said that ESA raises money partly because of the organization’s philanthropic duties. However, many of the members of ESA have their own pets and that inspired the sorority to help ARF.

Audreyalice Kubesch (left) and Meredith McKee pass out t-shirts to the event-goers.There were about 200 shirts made for Wednesday evening.

“I have a rescued dog who’s very important to me,” Kubesch said. “We just wanted to make sure enough pets could get adopted and have loving families that need them.”

Next month, ESA will be participating in “Dance Marathon”, an event that aims to raise money for Riley’s Children Hospital. The sorority will also be organizing “Up ‘til Dawn”, a nationwide student-led, student-run program in which college students raise funds for St. Jude’s Research Hospital.

Perception is relative; it is dependent upon previous experience and the cognitive skills of the individual.

The reading discusses how the graphic journalist cannot make assumptions as to how their audience will perceive a given design. The designer must tailor their work to those who will experience it. Ultimately, visual communication is a multilingual culture and any given diagram should be understood globally. Basic design elements can transcend language and cultural barriers.

Communication through imagery allows for explanation of complicated concepts or of things regularly hidden from view (e.g. the inside of the human body). Instead of using photographs of an actual cross-section of a human body, representational graphics can be used in place of them, even using simple shapes in place of realistic depictions, so long as the audience is able to understand what it is seeing.

Again, one cannot know how a viewer will perceive an image or graphic. Whereas text is comparably more precise, graphics are potentially more open to interpretation. Variance in visual skills and knowledge across myriad demographics pose a potential problem. This is why graphic designers study cognitive sciences, learning how the human mind works on a base level. When the mind must understand something, memory and visual perception determine how that something is understood.

Information processing in the human mind consists of sensory memory (immediate sensations received from sensory data), working memory (what one consciously thinks/is aware of) and long-term memory (that which is stored in the mind, to be recalled in order to facilitate understanding of new sensory data, in turn contributing to working memory).

Visual perception is can be viewed as partly driven by external stimuli (bottom-up processing) and partly driven by prior knowledge/expectations (top-down processing). Bottoms-up processing is based on immediate received stimuli. In a graphic, the use of the basic design principles are what affect this half of visual perception. Harmony or contrast are immediately perceived by the user/viewer if the elements in the graphic are different.similar to one another. While the graphic journalist can control whether the user/viewer will notice and perceive a given design principle, the journalist cannot control what said contrast/harmony makes the audience remember or think of without addressing top-down processing. By knowing one’s audience, one can know what certain design elements will make the audience think of (creating rhythm by using a graphic of repeated images of a truck that gradually turn into the huge drop-cap of a feature story inside a magazine about 80s cartoons will more likely make the audience of said magazine think of Transformers than it would make the audience of the Saturday Evening Post think of Transformers).

Sensory memory and working memory can each be seen as composed of two parts. Sensory memory is composed of visual perceived  stimuli (iconic) and auditory perceived stimuli (echoic). Working memory is similarly composed of two parts: verbal information and visual information. By pulling from both sensory and long-term memory, the mind makes sense of the world. The graphic designer can then manipulate (in a good way) these strands of thought through their work, weaving thought into solid understanding.

Once the memory and perception of the audience is understood, the entire fabric, or structure, of thought and knowledge is called a schema. By understanding what schema the concepts the graphic designer is trying to portray, comprehension and retainment are facilitated. Like the Gestalt theory’s idea of the whole being something other than the sum of individual parts, the schema is the whole of these thought processes and ways of perception.

My Geofacts graphic

My graphic would benefit from a re-analysis of the potential audience that would view it. While the Nile River Delta is visible, that image may not be iconic enough to make the audience think of “Egypt”. There also is no true dominant element (unless the map counts) and even then there is little consistency in the call-out graphics which might impede upon one’s ability to detect rhythm or continuation in the graphic. The mini-images also seem far too small and are dominated by the overly detailed background.

This bar chart is effective because it serves to proportionately show the difference between the earnings for graduates of varying levels; it’s a comparison. It also illustrates the nutgraf of the story instead of some barely related facts.

2. Fever Chart

The chart would have been better as a bar chart since there is supposed to be a comparison being made. There’s also little up and down movement of the chart, so a fever-style chart is unnecessary in this instance. Time is along the bottom, but even still. The use of a single letter for each month looks cool, but it might be better to just put an abbreviation for the sake of clarity, since someone would probably write in saying it was unnecessary.

3. Pie Chart

The pie graphs were an all right choice for the voting questions. Like the bar graph above, they show the proportion of each response to one another. Each pie represents a whole: the entire pool that was polled. There are also at least three options for each pie so the info wasn’t necessarily easier to just put into text.

4. Table

The table at the bottom of the page separates each item from one another using tints of blue. None of the info for each item can be confused with info for another. It also kind of has a triadic color scheme with the yellow on the left, the blue in the middle and the red on the substance’s packaging.

5. Timeline

It reads from left to right, which makes it clear that it’s talking about days to come. Having the days aren’t even necessary, to a certain extent. If the readers know the publication lists each item as representative of a single day’s weather, they could still understand it. The illustrations help a lot too for the scanning reader.

6. Locator Map

The map is decently zoomed out; sometimes locator maps are too close to the subject they’re trying to help readers understand the location of. This one works all right, even if it’s just tints of the same color; there are some cooler tints/hues that allow the important parts to stand out. That coloring is indicative of a choropleth map.

7. Statistical Map

This is another graphic that represents an important part of the story it’s paired with adequately. The gas prices are right there with the name of the gas station, so even if the reader doesn’t know which place is where, they can remember the station names that went with lower or higher prices.

8. Active News Map

This graphic could almost be in place of the story itself, at least in place of the lede. It not only gives information about the roads in the area, but it specifically talks about where roads are planned to be placed.

9. Active Diagram

This is a page from an online edition of a magazine. Up in the corner is a diagram for a puzzle game “Portal” and the little man needs to cross a gap. The diagram not only has arrows pointing to where he can use the Portal-making device to warp across, but it animated so that it actually moves through all the steps. It’s super effective!

10. Passive Diagram

Here is a diagram that shows what the new turn-traffic signal looks like. It doesn’t convey movement because it doesn’t have to. It dissects the traffic light and explains its parts below. If the publication had more room, it could have had arrows pointing to the… arrows to make it a little easier to comprehend (since the scanning reader is constantly jumping around the page).

~FIN

The good:

1.

The Journal Gazette has set a clear hierarchy of importance with its type of information, its headlines and images. The package story is has the most proximity to Fort Wayne and it has the largest photo, as well as alt-structure showing where the new building will be.

2.

The Burlington Free Press uses varying weights of the same font for three of its headlines which helps give a clear distinction between the two stories near the bottom (neither of which have photos/alt structure).

The graphic used in the package illustrates the message of the story well,and it creates an equal balance with the stories to the right. The quick reads to the top right are seen after the package story and the image/headlines that go with the genetics lab story.

Not so good:

4.

There is a huge editorial at the top of the page. Even though the editorial doesn’t disrupt the overall eye movement around the page, it still is in an awkward position because it seems separate from the rest of the page.  I would move the editorial to at least the next inside page and use whatever was used in the jump on the front. Granted, the page would risk looking comparatively empty than it does now, but the photos for the package could be reduced (the picture of a map shouldn’t be used unless it states it was an illustration by the newspaper; it also doesn’t really add much to the story and if it were removed, more room could be given to the photos that actually have something to do with the story.) The opinion piece at the bottom would also benefit from having more room so that there isn’t awkward spacing in the justified text.

5.

Unlike in the Burlington Free Press’ story about two opposing candidates, the Herald-Leader’s dual story-thing is as tall as the entire main story. The large photo is competing for dominance with the two mugshots/red+blue headers as the initial entry point for the reader’s eyes (if a reader looks at the election stories, the vertical design leads their eyes down and off the page). The two stories should be moved to the bottom of the page, maybe running side by side. The scanning reader would only see a large gap on the right side because of all the text. If the stories are moved below, then there would be a more equal distribution of weight on the page.

Oldstyle Serif

1. The Contra Costa Rica Times uses an old style serif for its title. The feet of the “A” aren’t uniform and the posture of the “O” suggests that this is a member of the old style serif race.

2. The Daily Sentinel uses an old style serif font in its title as well.

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Transitional Serif

3.“The jet stream” features characters with straight shoulders (on the “r” and the “m”). The difference between the thinnest and thickest parts of the characters isn’t that big, so it wouldn’t be put in the Modern Serif category.

4. There is a slight diagonal stress on the o’s in the News Journal’s serif headlines. The shoulders in the lowercase letters are straight, suggesting that a transitional typeface was used.

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Modern Serif

5. The contrast in thickness in “Variety” is a characteristic found in modern serif typefaces.

6. “Las Vegas Sun” shows contrast in its strokes; the one half of the “V” is thick while the other is thin.

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Grotesque Sans Serif

7. The font used in the larger text has a tall x-height, a characteristic that grotesque sans serif fonts have. The font is geometric because the counters are no round/square and the general design of the characters isn’t based on geometric shapes.

8. “Cyber Crisis” and the rest of its accompanying headline is grotesque. The x-height is again tall and the design is not geometric.

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Geometric Sans Serif

9. This issue of the News Journal uses a geometric sans serif font for its title. The o is a perfect circle; the x-height is tall, but the overall style is different from grotesque’s serif-proportions.

10. “Work”, “Community”, Life and the other sections listed along the top of the page are a geometric sans serif font. The “o”s are circular and it is not based on handwriting.

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Humanist Sans Serif

11. “Home Sweet Victory” is in a humanist sans-serif font; the subheads are in a humanist font as well.

12. The “burning Quran” headline is in a handwritten-like font; it isn’t uniform and it’s sans serif.

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Blackletter

13. The New York Times has used a blackletter typeface for its title for about 200 years now. It’s seen here in this (old) issue.

14. The Costa Rica Times in an edition of the San Jose News, and the title of San Jose News can be seen in near the top right of the page in blackletter.

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Novelty

15. “Stone Age” is done in a font that has illustrated characters.

16. “Casa Grande” is in a novelty font (above “Dispatch”, which is actually three different weights of a typeface all together, so it isn’t a novelty font).

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Script

17. This page also has “Luxury” is in a script font. Here, the cursive-like design doesn’t connect each letter.

18. This Taiwanese publication uses some script font letters near the top left. It contrasts with the more uniform font below it on the page.

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Square Serif

19. “Heat Playoffs Preview” is in a square serif font; the serfis are blocks and have no curvature.

20. “The News-Press” uses a square-serif font for its title. There is some curvature on the inside of the “E”s but it is still an example of a square serif font.