Crafting Visual Language for Social Science
Way before I become a designer, I already interested in humanity in general. I believe a human has different behavioural based on many things that shaped them, such as family, religion, education, financial, psychological, and many other fragments.
On March 2020, I agreed to be apart of Anotasi’s team as a part-timer until August 2020. When joining the team, they are sharing the term and explanation of social science. At the moment I realise, social science is what I have been interested in a long time ago.
Anotasi is a platform mimicking magazine with content that contains the topic of social science. Anotasi vision to make social science to be more reachable for people. Their approach is to educate the readers, social science is around us, and it happens daily. Anotasi will craft the topic with easy to understand language to help the reader to learn about social science.
In Indonesia, it appears that social science usually seen as something that only can be accessed by specific people. Mostly with a high education person that aware of the topic. As for many other, social science are one of the things that hard to believe. Because of the lack of openness and access for them to understand it.
Meanwhile talking about social science, the scope varies. Social science discusses gender, race, culture, history, religion, emotion, and many things that could shape human as a being. When it needed to interpret to visual, the team and I, we wanted the visual that can fit every aspect of social science.
At the time, we also in the making of our new branding for Anotasi. We call the project as Anotasi 3.0. A branding designer already creates branding guideline. What we wanted to craft is how the guidance can work to our website and social media.
To explain social science. We wish to have one illustration that speaks its idea that will appear on Anotasi website as the main illustration. Later on, we can reuse the main illustration in other media as Anotasi representative branding.
After a brainstorming session, we agreed the main illustration should be intricate, means a lot of stories that could be describing how social science happen from a lot of aspects. Messy, describing being a human is not perfect, yet we have to live our life as a human being.
Each section has its stories to explain parts of social science. In one area, there are social changes walk out from a cave every step they are evolving into the modern human. The idea was a long time ago; a human is trying to survive to live in the forest. What happen in the current situation rather than explore a forest, people tended to take a selfie as their leaving a mark has been there to share in social media.
In another area of the illustration. The story is a lover express their love. Society creates speculation in the ideal world; a man should be the one to express appreciation to women. In the actual world, it changes. Women are no longer shy to express their feeling for a particular person. Love should be a place for human to freely express their feelings, not a gender basis term.
When we are moving on to create a human character for the illustration, we don’t want to create human based on ethnicity, skin colour, and also we wish to avoid making a standard of the perfect human body in our visual. Human is a beautiful being, so the visual should embrace humanity.
That led us to the question, how might we generalise human as a being?
Art has a perspective theory. Meaning human is creating an assumption based on their glips of memory. When they see a half picture of the wheel, they will recognise it immediately. The theory opens a possibility for us to draw a human body no matter what colour covers the body.
As the new branding guide is driving us to six vivid colours, we see as opportunities to be more playful with the colour. These could be the answers to generalised human but still, look like a being.
We should mix all the stories in a globe like Anotasi’s wobbly. The unperfect shape of a circle to interpret how complicated and messy social science can be. But, it is still fascinating knowledge to learn. After we put it together of our thought and concept into visual, below was the final main illustration.
This concept guidelines will be the guidance of Anotasi illustration. Even though we already found the fundamental guide for the visual approach. We are expecting another insight to be explored in the future, to create more solid guidance for Anotasi’s illustration style.
When a visual combine with storytelling, it becomes a narrative for readers to gain more engage and create a stronger emotion for them. As a result, it more accessible to remember them. In conclusion, visual is the first aspect that catches human eyes. While crafting illustration guidelines, considers the illustration should be aligned to the branding so the visual language could speak clearly to get people attention and touch their emotion.
Realises, it could be one of the reasons why I love to become a designer. When I was working closely with Anotasi team, I could understand social science even more. Then eventually, what I do will bring a good impact on society.
If you are interested in social science, visit Anotasi website and social media, currently in the Indonesian language. The article above also published in the Indonesian language, which can be accessed here.
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Hopefully, you find the article is useful. Thank you for reading!
