Progress and Ideas

I also have an updated digital version of the tree but blogger isn't letting me upload anything else right now. These are sketches of my current idea for how to make this work as a print piece. Basically, you have the main "food tree" and then transparent overlays that you can combine where each overlay has the restrictions for an individual diet. I think this would allow the viewer to make connections between different diets.

working on scale

I decided to pick a bunch of interesting points from human history and use them on a timeline to help get a sense of scale. Then I plotted them all on a chart to get an idea of just how big I needed to make things. Wow, Bill Gates make a LOT of money. (minimum wage would take you 300,000 years. Attached are pics of the spreadsheet and the chart I cut out and tried to fiddle with ways of how to display this info. 

mockups and sketches

I'm going to repost the celebrity mockup I did earlier for feedback, I've also been pursuing a very abstract version of the disparity of wealth in the US. 

For the disparity example, I've tried not to use any words, though it seems like it may need some explanation. The large circle at the top shows the amount of wealth that the top 10% owns. The smaller circle beneath it shows the amount of wealth that the bottom 90% owns. In an earlier version of this (not posted) I had computed the area of the circles based on their diameter - which I think was wrong - the example posted uses the area of a circle, which I think is more accurate. (I was getting just giant disparities before) 

I've also been inspired by all of the bank failures in the news lately, and have done some pencil sketches of the "faces of welfare," comparing the bailout of people normally associated with welfare and CEO's of failed lending institutions that now need the government's help.

A few new sketches

Hey guys. I don't have a lot done but I have some and I'm still working. Here are a few new sketches just to show employment. I'm still working on a couple. The idea is that I can use these as icons overtop of some other map. I'm thinking that I'd rather have people though. So hopefully soon I can work on icons with people doing the particular job. That seems more emotional and personable to me.

I've printed out a map with Pittsburgh topography. I'm hoping to layer other elements over this (such as employment and population). Still working on this aspect.

I'm still struggling with making this a more emotional piece.

Anyways, here are a few of the icon sketches I started, but they will definitely change as I want the person in with them.




Here are images of the maps that I'm referring to. I plan on doing my own map with a different take on elevation.

A non-scientific classification of the American kitchen

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Here's a quick sketch of the one "branch" of the tree, seen in the context of two different diets. A few things I am running into are that I can't fit all of the names of the food into the tree two dimensionally-- I'm considering trying to create depth in the tree, although this would work better in a digital format so you could move around and see the tree from different angles.

I'm also wondering how I can represent all of this information for each diet at the same time- so that the viewer can the mapping of two or more diets at the same time and see what foods overlap or what parts of the "tree" tend to be more safe overall.

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Here is a quick (well, messy, but not quick) sketch of the idea I had to classify food. I want to use color to denote the "safeness" of each food for different diets, but I haven't put together examples yet. I have a few ideas, but for now here is this piece- see what you think.

FYI, I think I'm going have this piece be a bit tongue-in-cheek, as you might be able to tell.

Sketches

Here are some initial sketches for population, housing, and employment and occupation. I haven't ordered them from abstract to literal yet.

Some symbols

Here's a start on some icons representing different diets. I kept running into problems because the things I'm representing are pretty broad topics, and it's hard not to narrow them down too much.

I'll try to work on some more interesting ideas in the coming days.

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I found this website that I might collect some data from, even though it's a little late. Basically it has nutrition information for 13,000 foods (it's off of the USDA website). I found the "key" they provided to explain the food codes- it has a fairly complete list of all types of foods that I could work from as well. It's pretty cool anyway if anyone wants to check it out.

http://199.133.10.140/codesearchwebapp/(mqh4bfv4ghhohu55ikx5erny)/codesearch.aspx