SHOWCASE POSTER

INFORMATIVE POSTER, PRESENTATION, ILLUSTRATOR

Overview

The poster for our showcase is a stand-alone document that shows the audience what the opportunity is, what motivated it and how our design addressed it. It seems to be a graphic design, while in fact, my engineering design process played an essential role in my success in this poster.

I started the entire design by gathering information from different sources, ranging from examples from google (top photo), instructions from lectures (bottom photo) and advice from upper years/TAs.

HIGH-LEVEL DESIGN

NEED ANALYSIS

Once I had sufficient resources collected in the previous stage for me to decide what we need on the poster and what we don't, I started to frame this problem I was solving, that the poster

[FUNCTIONAL:]

Shows the opportunity framing and design solution;

[NON-FUNCTIONAL:]

Has clear and intuitive reading path,
Is able to stand alone as a representation of our project,
Is visually appealing with:
- Eye-catching graph;
- Concise texts.

These requirements mainly serve our primary stakeholders: audience and assessors; thus, I took some of them directly from lectures and the others from the IAT (Independent Assessment Tool).

Meanwhile, in order to make better use of these objectives, I created a checklist right out of this requirement model, which will be discussed in

— FRAMING

— DIVERGING & CONVERGING

With such straightforward objectives, the divergence is fairly limited - at the end, it is a poster, flat and visual, with texts and graphs.

Therefore, the examples gathered in the need analysis section became my first set of diverged concepts, and it was easily converged by the constraints of our own design solution - replacing the grass can hardly be represented as a functional product like most of the examples; in order to make it stand out, I decide to compare it with the current solution, both of which then took the large central space.

The representation part became essential in every step, for that the poster itself is a form of representation, and also that I wanted to show the design to my team and other people clearly enough to generate comments and inputs from them.

I first did a functional representation, with only the elements' arrangement and contents on the poster, and shared it with my team.

— PROTOTYPING & REPRESENTATION

GRAPHIC TOOL SELECTION

VISUAL REPRESENTATION

The draft passed through my team with no disagreement, marking the end of first round of my design process.

Now that the high-level design concept is set, the non-functional details of "how I want to represent this" started one after another round of the design process.

I will focus on two examples of them which I spent more time on and gained more from.

Process: Graphic Tool Selection

My need analysis, framing and diverging are all shown in the following Pugh chart, through the alternatives I listed and criteria I developed and ranked in descending importance to me.

I eventually chose Illustrator, which had better performance on my top-rated criteria while not doing too bad on the ones that I weighed less.

I don't regret using Illustrator because of both the good poster quality and my new skill learned. However, looking back at the process, I had a precious

Process: Visual Representation of Our Design Solution Itself

Challenge

Because the function of this poster is itself a part of the last step of my design process - visual representation, it was hard to evaluate the diverse ideas accurately without processing to the representation step. In other words, I could evaluate and converge ideas based on rougher drafts, but chances were that the design was found invalid only after I put it together in Illustrator and I had to start all over again with another design.

Strategy

Use the checklist discussed in the High-level design part and seek other people's input as frequently as possible to reduce the risk of spending too much time going deeper along a problematic solution.

However, it is just as important to distinguish the validity of input are very important: you don't negate a design just because of some misunderstanding or unsuitable suggestions either.

When I started the first round of this representation, I haven't thought over this challenge and used this strategy. I went all the way to nearly the end of the poster, with great confidence coming from its beautiful appearance:

When I brought this picture up for critique, however, my instructors and teammates all had some disagreements on some parts of this version of the poster, most of which could be prevented if I had gone through the checklist (objectives framed in the process of high-level design):

The texts were not concise;
The reading path was not clear as there is no effective titles;
What the solution is was also not made clear.

The suggestion from my team and instructors started my second round of diverging, converging and representation. This version listed the features of our solution separately:

This time, however, I kept in mind to seek my teammates' thoughts frequently and figured out that the reading path was still not clear soon enough to stop proceeding further.

I learned from the first 2 versions and made the 3rd one. I kept the idea of clearly separating the design features from version #2 as well as the big comparison picture from version #1.

Validating with our instructors, who was our assessors and thus stakeholders as well, I realized that there are still some important things that I ignored. Here was part of my conversation with one of my instructors (please read the emails from bottom up for correct chronological order). Note that I didn't take his advice and edited the poster right away; instead, I followed up and made sure that we understood each other correctly.

After talking to the other instructor who had similar opinions, I took their advice and adjusted the poster based on the resources (photos) we had, and finalized our design:

— Follow-up

This poster design process has now been concluded, by my learning process hasn't.

At the showcase, I asked my professor, whose expertises include communication, for feedbacks on my poster. He praised the overall effect of my poster for its clarity, conciseness, ease of navigation and aesthetics, and gave me some detailed advice, which I recorded for future reference:

I had both white-on-green/black and black-on-white texts; choosing only one of them would make the poster cleaner.
Make the black lines less thick for the same reason above.
Move the solution from top-centre to maybe vertically between the objectives and photos so that the reading path is clearer.
Remove the gray-grid background which didn't have any use.