Soccer

=Soccer=

Design Rationale
In this research and brainstorming project, I decided to investigate deeper into the world of soccer and its internals. More so than just looking at what the game is about and how it's played, but looking into the social relations between people involved in any way of this sport, and the social effects that soccer itself creates in society. Besides being just a sport, soccer is also a learning tool or system in which people go through to learn and gain knowledge of social relations and how they work, and general life lessons that they go through in life as well. That is why I decided to choose soccer as my medium; I found it interesting how soccer and other sports can bring out this type of life learning that people can benefit off of so much, and that there is an ongoing path of learning also. To show the different areas that soccer interacts with in society, I decided to kind of span out into four different sub-headings for the medium: team, social impact, commercialism, and way of life. These four different sub-headings lead into one another in some way, and relate back to soccer in the end creating a cycle. In the "team" section, it talks about what a team consists of in terms of players, coaches etc. and it investigates the interactions between and amongst these members, and show what type of results that can come out of them, both positive and negative. Which then leads into the social impact that soccer has on society, and the issues and conflicts which soccer raises. It goes into issues like racism, anger, and status established in society. Next the concept map goes into talking about the commercialization of soccer and the purposes it has by doing that, and what they want to gain from commercializing it. Lastly, the concept map goes looks into soccer as a way of life. This section discusses the role in which soccer plays in peoples' live and how some live for it and play it to survive, and how many choose it as a path to pursue and achieve happiness because of the love for the game. The look that I was aiming for was something that represented a journey like image, just like how soccer is like a journey and how soccer moves through society like journey. So, some sort of hand done or hand done effect would express this well; that was why I chose to use a handwritten font and hand drawn arrows as well. In terms of the image, I wanted it to work with the content and have relation with some of the words and the content it was investigating. So I decided to choose a stadium as a starting point, eventually moving into society or a city like environment; just like how soccer causes social impact in society and the commercialization of soccer in society. And with soccer being a global thing, I decided to use a soccer ball as the globe in which all of these interactions are happening to unify the whole thing together. With the soccer ball, and the world/globe, and the cycle of the relations within soccer, I though that together as an image and content layout, they both worked well with each, also with the style and look of the entire piece as well. Once again, the entire illustrative look was used to unify everything and its meaning with each other, and the meaning behind the concepts.

Challenges
In terms of challenges, I felt there were a few things that were kind of standing in the way as I was going along the project. For one, I had a lot of information in which I had to organize in a way where it wasn't too bunched up, but yet effective. And I think I was also spanning out in a few different paths, but then I was able to make them work with each other and the whole. And a big thing was mainly trying to organize everything neatly and effectively on the page without crowding it too much. Colours were also a bit tricky, because of my background colour; I needed to find something that stood out, but was still readable; so that took some time to fiddle around with.

Process Work:
These are just some images of my process work that I did that helped me along the way to my final concept map.

Layout Ideas:



Revised Layout Ideas:

Rough Concept Map:

Final!