I am interested in the topic of data art, I am inspired by beautiful works of wonderful Shirley Wu, Federica Fragapane, Giorgia Lupi and Nadieh Bremer!

I have some modest data-art works that are done traditionally, but I wanted to try something a little more complex.

Working with markers and liners on paper is so fun, I recommend it to everyone!

In the winter of 2023, I took a course by Stefanie Posavec, one of the authors of the book Dear data called "Analog Data Visualization for Storytelling".

The topic of my project was Travels.

As part of the project, I created a board for inspiration - I wanted to fill the project with a feeling of summer wanderings and sea adventures!
https://ru.pinterest.com/aniki13/data-art-travels-inspiration/

I've collected the data about my travels for 10 years!

The next stage is the stage of evaluating data, searching for patterns and patterns in them.

For example, trips to different regions are typical for different seasons.
Previously, there were more trips with friends, now mostly family. Especially with the appearance of a child. Amazing!

During the pandemic, trips became local or to relatives, which is also logical.

Of all these points, I liked the distribution of different types of trips by season, the change in the number of people and the type of company.

And I would like to add additional context.

The stage when you need to at least roughly understand what you want to do.
First, choose the basis - which are the coordinate axes.

Basic organization options are offered by Andy Kirk: Categories, Hierarchy, Relationships, Time and Space.

I chose Categories and Time as the two main variables.
Seasons and years. This should help me show the trends I wanted.

Then sketches again - one of the sketches came up for the concert, I'm trying to develop it further.
The idea of hanging seashells or something like little dream catchers seemed cute to me.
It's not very convenient to encrypt something in circles, but I'll think about how to implement it.

The structure is defined, the data is there. I started sketching and even made a prototype.

I didn't like everything, I went back to the sketches again - maybe it will be possible to organize the data in some other way.
Then it's up to the formation of a visual dictionary.

The visual dictionary is a preliminary legend without specifics, we decide which variables encodes which visual attribute.


When evaluating the visual dictionary, I realized that I don't use color and texture much. And I tried to fix it.

And I still haven't coded all the elements!

Sketching is my favorite part of the process, and then it's so hard for me to choose one option that will go to work out of all the cute lights!

Difficult choice!

Here is first version of the legend.

At this stage, I tested and changed the encoding a lot, and still, there is no guarantee that all this will look good on the final visualization, and there will be no overlaps!

I simplified the encoding method for the duration of the trip. Since it will be inconvenient to draw circles by hand, calculating the area of the circle is a separate matter, and it will be difficult to read data from the circle, and the error is high.
I decided to group the duration into short, medium and long.

As a continuation of the project, I am thinking about making this dataart material - to assemble it from rings, beads, feathers and strings.