Questionnaire Summary Progress Report #1

I only put the questionnaire up last night, and have only had 5 responses so far, but I thought I would post the progress of it so far. Here are some screen grabs of an analysis page;

As you can see, question 2 and question 5's answers are varying quite a lot so far. It seems that before things have even started, people only 'sometimes' read music publications in the first place, which puts into doubt whether or not the industry could afford to take such a big risk in propelling image reviews over text ones. At the moment it seems the two could go hand in hand. I think I should have posted a question about whether users would prefer an indexical or creative approach, however. If it isn't too late, I could add this question into it for future participants.

Design Revamp

Just realised I have never posted a screen shot of my reviews site for my pilot. Revisiting it has made me even more aware of how basic and unimpressive it is. I want to revamp everything to include more graphical buttons at the very least. It's too plain and boring at the moment. As well as working on my Isotype index, I will get to work on Photoshop, Dreamweaver and possibly Flash to give the site the update it sorely needs.

I am gravitating towards scrapping the 'music news' site approach entirely in favour of a simplistic linear, chronologically listed gallery approach, in order to maintain the 'up to the minute' aspect that music news websites incorporate. I want to avoid it being a static gallery such as that of an artist, because the entire nature of music reviews is its interchangability, with new releases achieving top spot within layouts etc.

I am kind of glad I revisited this work today, as I feel a lot more inspired to update it now, because it's a little embarrassing. I know I wanted to go for 'simplistic,' but there's that and then what I created. It belittles my skill as a web designer, really. I don't think I'm fantastic by any means, but looking back, this is a little embarrassing.

I still like the idea of a plain white background and basic black text, but something a little more dynamic and interactive would be preferable, such as the websites I mentioned previously. Kill Pixie's gallery amongst others. This past week has been very much research and background focused. Now I need to put all of the theory into practice.

Hmm

Have noticed a lot of traffic from a Russian/Ukrainian meme site today, very strange. Hello to my 13 Ukranian readers, I guess. And hello to Germany and the United States. No idea what is interesting to people who aren't involved in this project, but yeah.

Isotype Index

I thought I would post a few pre-existing Isotype images to see if anything currently existing could correspond with reviews I could translate. This is mostly for reference and to avoid cross-referencing.

As you can tell, the images seem to serve a very different purpose to what it is I'd use them for. Mine would cover far less propagandist imagery, and would serve more as an image-dictionary. Here are a couple of pieces I put together for my pilot;

The images are fairly crude and didn't take long to make, but as of today I plan on making at least 25 different images for a small index in time for next week's lecture.

Review Ideas - Maribel

Just come across a review for Maribel - Reveries. Whilst the text shows room for creativity, this word cloud I've made shows that most of the key words are just band-related and aren't really about the music. An interesting turn this has shown is that if you cut out all of the background information, it doesn't leave the review with much to 'visualise.' It's more a biographical review and that takes away from the image potential and highlights how much some reviews rely on the text element of their message.

Without all of the key words related to the band (i.e. Maribel, Reveries, Record, Aesthetics (the name of their first release)) and all of the words needed structurally (i.e. 'although,' 'much' etc.) all there really is is 'dreamy, stensil, radiantly, haunting' and so forth, which are very vague terms and almost rely on the text for a context, as I also noticed 'danger' on there, and I believe the review references a lack thereof, rather than saying the record sounds 'dangerous.' With a review like this, I think it would be much more interesting to create some original artwork which depicts the tone and mood of the album rather than try to simply replicate certain quotes, which may have been the case with my M83 review.

I was considering using this review for my experiment, but I don't think it's written well enough from a creative perspective - but then again, my project is designed to highlight this, rather than rely on something that translates well. Whether it works as a medium of replacement is what I'm trying to discover; but on first glance, I would say this particular review won't have much resemblance to the original text.

Genre Diversity

I have had a change in plan for the experiment I posted a group for earlier: Now, I think I will assign each participant the latest reviews I can find in different genres - one in Alternative/Rock, one in Hip Hop, one in Pop, one in RnB or whatever, and I will make a corresponding image for each. So I will make 5, and each other person one each, if time permits. If they could each do two each, that would be great, so there is more variety, but I think so far, all of my pieces have been too similar from a genre perspective.

I will pick a reviews website - gravitating towards Pitchfork right now because some of their pieces can be quite controversial, and select the latest review in each genre so there is no favouritism and more of a random element. Hopefully no one would have heard the albums in question, so there will be no bias and each participant won't know what to expect. I might not even read each review myself until the links have been distributed. I think it's a better idea to include some diversity. By this time tomorrow, I would have started on my images at least. I will put together a rough sketch for a layout update before I see my tutor in the morning.

Whoops

I could not figure out for the life of me how to check results for the first survey I created, so I made a new one. The link is http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/2QFLJ68. There is an option to provide graphical reports on the results (which may be for premium members only) which could be nice. This survey takes up to 100 responses too, which is better.