This data visualisation project was the first collaborative design project I have completed while at university, and despite my reservations surrounding group work, I am incredibly happy with the outcome, despite some hurdles faced along the way.
I was elected the Project Leader for this campaign by my team mates, due to my time keeping and organisation skills, as well as my knowledge in the area of climate change; I got a First in an optional module during my first year named The Science of Climate Change. My role was to oversee the project, and to allocate roles to suit my other two team members' strengths. My personal role within this project was designing the overall visual identity of the poster and animation – deciding that a textured simple vector style would suit the theme of the poster, as well as designing around half of the graphics, researching the majority of the statistics, working on the first half of the animation, as well as sourcing the music to be used in the background. I also was in charge of compiling everything together to form the poster layout and design, as well as all the typographic decisions throughout to ensure consistency between the poster and animation. My other team members focused on the copy writing, graphics and the rest of the animation.
My early concepts around the data visualisations which could be placed on the poster and in the animation.
We managed to work well as a team throughout, despite some time-keeping issues from some members, meaning our meetings started quite late in some instances. Everyone seemed happy with the idea of the project and I think this passion for the cause helped in the success of the final outcome. We seemed to be keeping ahead of schedule and producing more work earlier than other groups and sticking within the time constraints. Our visual identity seemed to come together nicely, and me and one of my team members managed to both design different data visualisation graphics, yet follow the same visual identity, leading to a consistent and clean poster design, without it looking like it was designed by two separate people.
There were some hurdles towards the end of the project, as we couldn't work out how to make the plants grow in Adobe AfterEffects as planned – I had been overseeing this yet not animating myself, focusing on completing the poster, as I felt my animation skills were weaker than my team mates. However, I chipped in the best I could, and actually found a solution for the problem, which really made me more confident in my abilities.
As well as this, there was definitely a disparity in the amount of work contributed and completed by each team member, although this is always to be expected with group work. I found this quite difficult to manage, as there's a limit to how much you can push someone to do work. However, things all came together in the end, and I am incredibly proud of my team and myself for the work we produced.
