Digital Report Documentation Design
Digital Report Documentation Design
January 2018
Typographically rearrange a given chunck of text into an internal report for a given client (Federal Aviation Agency).
Task
This is an individual task where the students are expected to rearrange, twist a raw piece of plain text about industrial ecology into a very organic digital report, which explains to our client (Disney, Amazon, FAA of my own choice) about the importance of industrial ecology. We are free to gather resources through the internet, and arrange the pictorial and textual materials neatly on a 960px by 650px canvas.
I selected Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as my client, as it represents a typical design request from a (stereotypically) less design-oriented administration. Specifically, my design should target both engineers and safety inspectors who work for FAA.
Domain Research
To dive deeper and better understand my audiences, I conducted several researches to understand FAA’s role and its relation to aerospace industries. In general, FAA is responsible for inspection, regulatory decisions on pilots, aircrafts (manufacturers, materials used) and airports. Besides, FAA also has a research lab (William J. Hughes Technical Center) that conducts researches and tests on various topics.
With respect to their efforts on industrial ecology: FAA used to have the guidance Airport Environmental Handbook (1980 - 1985). Now they are having Airport Environmental Program that includes both airport recycling and airport sustainability. These are all core parts of airport planning. FAA also funds airport with their Airport Improvement Program (AIP) for airport for public use. Airport wish to enhance their environmental concerns are eligible to apply for this program.
How will this industrial ecology report impact the two different roles working for FAA?
Engineers are most interested in what tools to build to maintain the whole system. There can be material scientists, mechanical engineers, computer engineers, and many others. Their top priorities would be to understand the goals of their tools, the technologies involved, and legal limitations imposed. Specifically, with regarding to the ecologies, they would like to know the outcome of their new constructions, what technologies are available, and what they can or cannot do. Perhaps also the barriers? How they are going to build airport / aircraft differently?
Inspectors wish to learn about the safety standard, and how to enforce them. They are the people who would review airport / aircraft / flight plans, analyze through and try to identify potential safety hazards. They might either do this inside a meeting room, or on site. With regarding to industrial ecology, a safety inspector would wish to learn its impact on the current safety regulations, and how they would identify the design flaws and guide the aerospace designers to build up a safer system. They might wish to use this PDF document as a little handbook to quickly scan through.
Design
I sketched a book map (left) and page layout (right). I devised a equal-width sixcolumn grid system to achieve the flexibility, because 6 is the least common multiple of 1, 2 and 3. The 5 schemes in the page layout I came up with were serving different purposes: some are relaxing, and some are more serious.
I then went through several iterations to change the grid layout, as well as find the best assets that properly fit my target audiences (the engineers and inspectors of FAA). Besides, I also highlighted some keywords that I think would be useful for my inspector audience, so that they can quickly locate the relevant concepts within the document.
The evolution of the first three pages during iteration 2 - 4. These three grid templates were used during many following pages and were representative for the trends in the entire documents.
Result
Overall, the final presentation was great. I walked through the entire design for the class and explained my design decisions in detail. The instructor suggested that the glossary, which I designed for the safety inspectors and was intentionally left at the top to avoid the distraction, could be brought closer to the text to merge with the text altogether through varying on colors.
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