The State of the Art in Cartograms

Cartograms combine statistical and geographical information in thematic maps, where areas of geographical regions (e.g., countries, states) are scaled in proportion to some statistic (e.g., population, income). Cartograms make it possible to gain insight into patterns and trends in the world around us and have been very popular visualizations for geo-referenced data for over a century. This work surveys cartogram research in visualization, cartography and geometry, covering a broad spectrum of different cartogram types: from the traditional rectangular and table cartograms, to Dorling and diffusion cartograms. A particular focus is the study of the major cartogram dimensions: statistical accuracy, geographical accuracy, and topological accuracy. We review the history of cartograms, describe the algorithms for generating them, and consider task taxonomies. We also review quantitative and qualitative evaluations, and we use these to arrive at design guidelines and research challenges

Single story layout - efficient format for digital magazine publishing on tablet devices

The aim of this thesis is to define digital magazine format characteristics and examine its influence on the reading experience. The motivation behind was to examine the viability of single story magazine concept -- publishing format for the mobile generation. The field of research is digital publishing, focused primarily on magazines for tablet computers. Print magazine businesses and entrepreneurs with web publishing background both are approaching the new medium by experimenting with format, contents and distribution. The standards for the digital magazine formats have not yet been established, and the definition of digital magazine implies meanings within broad categories. The study reviews print and digital magazine workflows analyzing variations of mutual integrations. Theoretical chapters also include revision of digital magazine format components and overview of authoring tools. Practical experiment was conducted to reveal usability problems in digital magazine formats. Two existing magazines are tested, digital version of traditional magazine and single story magazine representing unbundled publication. Mixed methods were chosen for usability testing – heuristic analysis, observation and evaluation questionnaire. It was found that digital magazine readers prefer smaller volumes of content in comparison to print legacy formats. Research reveals that readers are not accustomed to magazine reading on tablets. Study also offers suggestions for improved usability and more satisfying reading experience concluding that single story magazines is a viable opportunity in digital magazine landscape, worth further investigation.http://tartu.ester.ee/record=b2656169~S1*es

Internship report: Thomas Kembeke

Este relatório detalha e caracteriza o estágio realizado pela aluna Irene Sanchez Lemos Alves, no studio de design Thomas Kembeke, entre os meses de Fevereiro de 2019 até Julho de 2019. Permitindo-lhe a aquisição do grau de Mestre em Design e Cultura Visual. Este relatório descreve os trabalhos desenvolvidos pela aluna. Esta oportunidade contribuiu para trabalhar com projetos reais de Design postos em prática no mercado, contactar com a realidade e trabalhar com uma equipa com membros de áreas distintas possibilitando também focar-se mais especificamente do Design de Comunicação e Editorial. Este estágio abrangeu várias vertentes do Design, desde o Design de Identidade, Design Visual ao Design Editorial. Simultaneamente, este estágio permitiu a aluna refletir sobre o papel do designer na sociedade contemporânea.This report details and characterizes the internship given by student Irene Sanchez Lemos Alves ant the Thomas Kembeke design studio from February 2019 to July 2019. Allowing the student to acquire a Master's degree in design and visual culture. This report describes the work done by the student. This opportunity contributed to work with real design projects and put into practice all the knowledge and skills acquired in the Bachelor of Design to contact with real. Make contact with reality and work with a team with members from different areas, allowing to focus, on Communication Design and Editorial. This internship covered various aspects of design, from the Identity Design, Visual Design at the Design Editorial. At the same time, this stage allowed the student to reflect on the role of the designer in contemporary society

Visualization as a Means of Influence (on the Example of Student Periodicals)

Visualization is a modern tool of communication with media perceptive readers. Visual means allow to influence the emotional sphere of the reader, replace certain information and the number of characters, diversify the compositional design of publications and create their aesthetics, which affects the image and reputation of periodicals. Visualization is a tool that is actively used in student periodicals, the target audience of which is modern youth with clip thinking. In order to attract the attention of such readers, to intensify their attention, the editors of student publications diversify the content with the help of a set of visual aids. In particular, typical forms of visualization in publications are photographs, drawings, pictures, symbols, comics, puzzles, tables, graphics, variation of page space with fonts, colors, decorative lines. The article analyzes the content of student magazines in Ukraine and Poland on the means of visualization and states the effectiveness of visual communication for these publications. As a result of research it is established that visualization has specificity of the influence (complexity and systematics). Determining criteria for the effectiveness of visual communication of student periodicals are visual activity, the degree of cognitive perception, compositional organization, supragraphemics, topographemics, non-pictographic elements, text positioning

Diffusion-based Document Layout Generation

We develop a diffusion-based approach for various document layout sequence generation. Layout sequences specify the contents of a document design in an explicit format. Our novel diffusion-based approach works in the sequence domain rather than the image domain in order to permit more complex and realistic layouts. We also introduce a new metric, Document Earth Mover's Distance (Doc-EMD). By considering similarity between heterogeneous categories document designs, we handle the shortcomings of prior document metrics that only evaluate the same category of layouts. Our empirical analysis shows that our diffusion-based approach is comparable to or outperforming other previous methods for layout generation across various document datasets. Moreover, our metric is capable of differentiating documents better than previous metrics for specific cases

Ideation as an intellectual information acquisition and use context: Investigating game designers’ information-based ideation behavior

Human Information Behavior (HIB) research commonly examines behavior in the context of why information is acquired and how it will be used, but usually at the level of the work or everyday-life tasks the information will support. HIB has not been examined in detail at the broader contextual level of intellectual purpose (i.e. the higher-order conceptual tasks the information was acquired to support). Examination at this level can enhance holistic understanding of HIB as a ‘means to an intellectual end’ and inform the design of digital information environments that support information interaction for specific intellectual purposes. We investigate information-based ideation (IBI) as a specific intellectual information acquisition and use context by conducting Critical Incident-style interviews with ten game designers, focusing on how they interact with information to generate and develop creative design ideas. Our findings give rise to a framework of their ideation-focused HIB, which systems designers can leverage to reason about how best to support certain behaviors to drive design ideation. These findings emphasize the importance of intellectual purpose as a driver for acquisition and desired outcome of use