The goal is to redraw the charts and diagrams in such as way that they look nice and hold together as a set across a multiplicity of forms.
The Digital Catalogue Study we worked on with a few other museums offers some examples such as in the Who is using the catalogues? and Further Analyses chapters. And the illustrations in 17 Data Visualization Techniques All Professionals Should Know article from the Harvard Business Review are also good examples. In all these cases, the work is less about creating award-winning designs or wholesale reimagining of the charts and diagrams, but rather simply bringing some refinement and consistency to them. Consistent ...
Font selection and type size
Line weight and color
Shapes
Arrow shape and size
Color palette
Use of shading and color fill
Ultimately, the process on this book will serve as a foundation for us for future books. Some of which we may also redraw in house, and some of which may be farmed out to vendors. But this current work will help us better define the scope of the work that needs to be done and the best methods for making it happen.
Getting Started
To get started, select three charts and diagrams from the book to use as samples in the redrawing. Ideally they would represent the range of formats (sizes, complexities, types) in the book as a whole. We'll want to show the authors 2, or maybe 3, variations on this set.
We ultimately want to display them in either SVG or PNG formats, so these should be vector illustrations, likely drawn in Illustrator. The type should not be outlined, but rather left as regular text.
One trick (that I haven't fully figured out) to keep things like line thickness and font size consistent across different charts and diagrams is that they will be resized to fit the width of the text column when we put them in Quire. Meaning, if one chart is 640px wide (the width of our standard text column) and another is twice that at 1280px, and both use 16pt type and a 2pt rule line, the type and lines of the large chart are going to appear half the size as the other when the large chart is scaled down to fit the narrower width and the small chart isn't scaled at all. I think the solution is to draw as many of the charts in the book as possible at the same width (some multiple of 640px). And then establish a second, larger width for any charts that need more space. And for that alternate width, also make it a multiple of 640px, and maybe also try to keep the size of the other elements in similar multiples. For example, if the smaller charts use 16pt and 20pt type and the larger charts are twice as big, use 16pt and 20pt for those, but also 32pt and 40pt type if you need larger sizes so when they scale down by half they'd have some similarities between the two charts? I'm not sure, but hopefully you get the idea.
Please use Noto Sans for the font. This is the font that is used for the body text, figure captions, and tables in the 'modern' Quire theme, which is what this book uses.
For the color palette, you can draw from the book cover.
jenpark-getty
commented
8 months ago
The goal is to redraw the charts and diagrams in such as way that they look nice and hold together as a set across a multiplicity of forms.
The Digital Catalogue Study we worked on with a few other museums offers some examples such as in the Who is using the catalogues? and Further Analyses chapters. And the illustrations in 17 Data Visualization Techniques All Professionals Should Know article from the Harvard Business Review are also good examples. In all these cases, the work is less about creating award-winning designs or wholesale reimagining of the charts and diagrams, but rather simply bringing some refinement and consistency to them. Consistent ...
Ultimately, the process on this book will serve as a foundation for us for future books. Some of which we may also redraw in house, and some of which may be farmed out to vendors. But this current work will help us better define the scope of the work that needs to be done and the best methods for making it happen.
Getting Started
To get started, select three charts and diagrams from the book to use as samples in the redrawing. Ideally they would represent the range of formats (sizes, complexities, types) in the book as a whole. We'll want to show the authors 2, or maybe 3, variations on this set.
We ultimately want to display them in either SVG or PNG formats, so these should be vector illustrations, likely drawn in Illustrator. The type should not be outlined, but rather left as regular text.
One trick (that I haven't fully figured out) to keep things like line thickness and font size consistent across different charts and diagrams is that they will be resized to fit the width of the text column when we put them in Quire. Meaning, if one chart is 640px wide (the width of our standard text column) and another is twice that at 1280px, and both use 16pt type and a 2pt rule line, the type and lines of the large chart are going to appear half the size as the other when the large chart is scaled down to fit the narrower width and the small chart isn't scaled at all. I think the solution is to draw as many of the charts in the book as possible at the same width (some multiple of 640px). And then establish a second, larger width for any charts that need more space. And for that alternate width, also make it a multiple of 640px, and maybe also try to keep the size of the other elements in similar multiples. For example, if the smaller charts use 16pt and 20pt type and the larger charts are twice as big, use 16pt and 20pt for those, but also 32pt and 40pt type if you need larger sizes so when they scale down by half they'd have some similarities between the two charts? I'm not sure, but hopefully you get the idea.
Please use Noto Sans for the font. This is the font that is used for the body text, figure captions, and tables in the 'modern' Quire theme, which is what this book uses.
For the color palette, you can draw from the book cover.