The above image depicts the final outcome of a collaborative venture to not only produce a bespoke map of Leeds, but to explore the city and establish an understanding of just how much Leeds has to offer in terms of establishments and locations that inspire, enhance and provide for the creative community that resides here.
Having a previously established personal connection to the city that led me to complete my Foundation Diploma in Art & Design here last year, I was already considerably acquainted with the city and its locations, including those given to us to find and research as a group. These were Friends of Ham, Leeds Art Gallery, Everyman Cinema, The Royal Armouries and also the student accommodation lived at by each of the group members - this being Liberty Park. Each of these places were to be plotted on the map alongside visuals identifiable to each of them individually.
As a group, on day one of task we decided to each go away and contemplate/produce some initial ideas for how the map should look in terms of style, aesthetic and concept. It was my thought that the map should exhibit each of the locations in question connected/linked back to Leeds College of Art as a starting point, as a place that everybody as students at LCA would know geographically. I created the visual taking inspiration from the colourful route-lines of Massimo Vignelli's 1972 "New York Subway Map," but instead opted for more fluid, spontaneous lines with a less rigidity to communicate the freedom that can be found in this diverse city, as well as the complexity of direction in Leeds as a result of its one-way traffic systems and small interconnecting streets, which can however be used to advantage in finding shortcuts to many areas - e.g. cutting through/across the university campus and hospital. The resulting image exhibited free flowing lines branching out from the location of LCA.
In terms of colour I initially used bright, vibrant colours as a starting point but was unhappy with the aesthetic this created, which I viewed as somewhat childish. The following day I pitched the concept to the group and we unanimously decided to go forward with the idea following some adaptation - colour included. As a group we decided to focus on co-ordination, legibility and simplicity in communicating the locations on the map, and therefore changed and exchanged the featured colours to ones that established instant connections to the given places - explanations for which are as follows:
Liberty Park: Blue because of the buildings colour itself and also its visual identity/logo.
Friends of Ham: Pink to represent the charcuterie status of the establishment and the pig they use as a part of their branding.
Leeds Art Gallery: Teal - as used in their logo and web-design.
Everyman Cinema: Deep red for connotations of stereotypical old theatre/cinema chairs.
The Royal Armouries: Grey to represent metal of armour.
It was then suggested by one of the group members that we created a key featuring co-ordinating colours to the route lines for simple and easy identification of the featured locations. Whilst I produced this, the other group members began creating individual hand-drawn illustrations and accompanying type for each of the places to enhance the strength of their identities on the map, using clear visuals that would easily/instantly be visually associated with each of the places plotted on the map. We decided as a group a hand-drawn approach to the illustrations would provide the map with an enriched element of character, suitable in communicating each of the places which are all exclusive to the city of Leeds. The illustrated identities and type treatments were then sent to me to apply compositionally to the existing route-design and key.
Once applied to the map in a straightforward column, mirroring the ordering of the route lines from left to right for ease of understanding, we explored what colour the illustrations should be - either co-ordinating to the route and key or something alternate. After experimenting, we decided to feature them all in dark grey. We found that black was too harsh and created too much visual contrast that distracted from the true focal points of the map. The grey tone supplied us with a much more tonally-coheisve visual that successfully and sophisticatedly communicated all the information featured on the map.
At this stage we were all happy with what we had produced as a team, but all felt that the overall aesthetic was lacking something, looking to simple as a whole. To resolve this issue we added in a grey scale map of leeds to feature as the background. We decreased the opacity of the background until it was prominent enough to show the location accuracy of the plotted locations and give a greater sense of surrounding area, but subtle enough to not overpower the composition or alter the visual hierarchy. This was faded out toward the right where they key is to maintain optimum legibility.
The group was by this point confident we had not only completed the requirements of the brief, but had produced something we were all proud of that communicated all the necessary information through a clear, sharp and simple visual language - suitable for purpose, informed and also relevant in the design decisions we made to establish the connection to the city of Leeds. This was verified through the positive feedback we received in the class critique.
In retrospect, I believe the map could have perhaps been improved by the inclusion of short explanatory paragraphs to provide information on our featured locations to give the map reader a more extensive understanding of what the establishments provide.
Below are selected images documenting the significant stages of our design process.
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