Can I Call You?
I call a LOT of people. Apparently. I didn’t think about it too much until this project. I was tasked to observe and quantify something in my life.
The reality is that I had no idea what I wanted to track when I was told to “observe and quantify something in my life.” I collect a lot of things and my life is full of stuff, so I had a really hard time narrowing down what I wanted to do.
For the first step of this project, I moodboarded.
After this, I sat and waited for a while. Mostly because I had no idea what I wanted to do. I was hoping that divine inspiration would strike and I would figure out what I wanted to do, but that never happened.
Days went by before I started thinking about this data again. And then the fear of deadlines crept in. I decided that phone calls are my route. So then came the data collection. Shoutout to iPhones for keeping track of my phone calls, because I was able to look at all of my information for the month of February. I also have a fairly good memory, so I was able to figure out where I was and what I was doing during all of the phone calls.
From here, I honestly was not sure where to go. I had this mountain of data in front of me, but no path. I started consulting the book Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, hoping that I would be struck with some sort of inspiration. It worked! Thinking about my different data points, I started sketching what my data could look like.
Ultimately, I knew that I wanted to use a bunch of lines. This led me to my final sketch, which definitely influenced my final poster. This is also where I started to think about different icons and how I could use it in my poster.
Once I had this, I started just plotting my data. I came up with a rough draft that had the vague idea of what I wanted. The shape was there, but the refinement that I wanted was definitely not.
I got lots of great feedback on this poster, and was given the idea that I should put more personality into it. This was great, because it meant that I was able to talk about some of my favorite phone calls on this poster. I also needed to refine my icons and think about the placement a little bit more.
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At this point, I also started thinking about risograph prints and how I can use those to support my data. This also went through 1000 different drafts. I honestly had no idea how I was supposed to show “a phone call” in an artistic and abstract way. My first idea was just thinking about phones in general. It was not very good.
I ended up not liking these at all. The Riso printer also ran out of masters, so I decided to pivot and try something else. I thought of using photography and showing the places that I was calling people from. I also thought maybe I should solidify my color palette to something simple to tie all of the pictures together. I still did not like it very much.
Ultimately, we got close to the deadline and I was still stuck on my risograph prints. Erica told me that I should try and create riso prints that were all made out of circles, because there are a lot of circles in my main data poster. I liked this idea, and stuck with it for pin-up. The only picture I have of it is actually a photo that Patrick sent me as he walked by. I knew that I wanted to change them.
Shocking to no one, I got a lot of feedback in my riso posters during critique. There was a general consensus that the posters did not have my usual sense of humor, and people wanted a way for my to do that. Think back to my first round of risograph prints…
I was super inspired by my “Hey Girl” poster from my original set, so I decided to use that as a guide for all of my prints. Each color corresponds to a person and a phone call on the larger poster, which I really enjoy. It feels a lot more like me, and a lot more like something I would like to see on a risograph poster anyway.
Overall, I am incredibly happy about how these turned out. It was definitely a process to get to the end result, but I am very glad that I got to where I did. Here’s to 100 more calls in March (and beyond)!
