Context
Timeline project required me to visualise data I found in research.
Process
I started with lots of different ideas and have chosen Chinese characters as my topic. I wanted to find out how they change over time but soon found the main challenges of the project:
1. How to represent the very large time span? (6600BC – 20th Century)
2. How to communicate across the language barrier?
3. There are many characters but only very limited resource available. And they are all in low quality.
To solve these problems, I decided not to follow the scale of time, but only put the script names on the centre line, and draw lines leading to detailed information.
I chose bird and fish as my characters to be displayed for two reasons: they exist for a long time and I believe I don’t need to explain the meaning as the characters are very graphical.
To solve the last problem, I had to spend hours to draw all the old forms of writing in Adobe Illustrator by hand due to the available images online are all very blur.
A version with background colour (but decided not to use)
Final outcome
(A1 size poster)
ye:arts 