People interested in a study face the problem of deciding which course of studies to choose. Names and descriptions maybe don’t help that much and even people who are enrolled can’t explain exactly what it is your course is all about. And it is not by coincidence that things like that are so confusing because people are different and especially creative studies like ‘Multimedia Design’ give you a lot of freedom to develop in your own direction and speed. Tackling that problem I developed “Treeme”, a Tool for visualizing Students, Alumni and their Projects. The general Task was to make something for the 15 Years Anniversary of “Multimedia | VR-Design”.
“Treeme” comes from Treemap. I decided early on that I wanted to visually compress people in cubes and have their surface and color indicate what type of person that is. So by having people specialize every Cube becomes individual, which is a thing I wanted to preserve. So here the colors represent categories. The bigger one colored-area is, the more pojects in this category have been made by e.g. a student or group of students. I think Treemaps are very powerful in how much information they can contain and how fast they can be perceived.
Trying to find categories for all the different Projects Students make I approached the problem from a very general direction like “2D, 3D, 4D” (downside: not very good to understand, upside: few categories) and a very specific one: “2D Animation, 3D Animation, Illustration, Digital Painting…” (downside: too many categories, upside: easy to understand). The solution was something inbetween: Video & Animation, Gamedesign, Tools & Visualisation, Installations and Experiments and Other. It gives a better idea of what the Project is about but is also still manageable.
