Problem
Each daily entry in my pandemic diary consists of five pieces of content.
- A written description of what happened to me/my observations of the day
- A news headline, almost always related to Covid 19
- An image or often images created by me that day
- An image caption
- The day number and date
It is expected that additional elements will become available as a result of qualitative research.
There are currently just over 730 diary entries recorded in several Microsoft Word documents.
Additionally, I keep notebooks that record my daily thoughts and feelings.
The problem is that I don’t have a visually interesting or scaleable way to illustrate/present the content.
Hypothesis
By carrying out a number of rapid experiments combining handwritten, found and computer generated text through different mixed media materials and techniques I will discover:
- More interesting ways to present text
- New approaches to hand lettering that extend my visual style
Expected results
I will find new and effective ways to illustrate/present text.
What happened
I thought it was important to start immediately to avoid procrastination. I created the first test sheet.
The images use mixed media that combine imagery and text from the pandemic diary.
The approach was deliberately loose and playful.
What I learned
Whilst I did learn something new about combining handwritten text and imagery, the most important realisation was that I didn’t need to constrain myself to a chronological diary format.
It felt like the experiment was too constrained. I had assumed that the pandemic diary content would be best presented in a diary format, and the challenge I had to solve was just one of layout.
This was a problem because I felt that the content was not strong or consistent enough to stand on its own; some days the images and text were strong and some days weak.
I needed a more fundamentally different approach.
What I’ll do next
I paused for about six weeks. It was after a tutorial that I realised I could be more creative in combining and treating my source content.
This led to Experiment 2…
Illustration 