a user's guide to abby

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documenting my daily life to convey power and order

have you ever wished to see how your life is divided, what and why things are prioritized, or what areas need to be managed more efficiently? i'm a very habitual person, so of course i think of this often.

ideation and research

i began this project by journaling my activities on august 22 of 2022. each entry was then organized in a spreadsheet based on time, type of activity, and location; this made it easier to filter through types, sort it alphabetically and even create graphs to point me into a direction which i could base my poster on.

the information organized into categories is what really caught my eye. i found that, over the course of my day, i spent:
26.5% traveling
16.3% on personal time
16.3% preparing, documenting, and planning
14.3% eating or preparing food
10.2% taking care of my pets
8.2% at school or working on homework
4.1% working for my internship
4.1% socializing

drafting

next, i began drafting potential infographic styles which each pertained to different factors such as location (one), category (two), and hierarchy (three).

refining and polishing

out of the three drafts, the middle one had the most potential and got my point across in a simple way, but didn’t lack the context it needed.

the next step was to complete all of the illustrations and get a glimpse of what my final poster would look like. i changed the colors of the background shapes and made them larger to fill up the unnecessary white space between rows. this helped the poster flow better and represented each percentage a bit more accurately.

after getting feedback about how cluttered the poster felt, i rearranged some objects and gave each row a color overlay to further tie the objects together.