For this data sketch assignment, I aimed to show the frequency of young adults who have dealt with Any Mental Illness(AMI). The National Institute of Mental Health reports that in young adults ages 18-25, 25.8% have lived with a mental illness. I found this alarming that about a quarter of people my age are dealing with AMI, and yet because of the stigma around mental illnesses(even though this is improving!), this is rarely talked about especially in correlation to how prevalent it is.
To demonstrate this I decided to use scale and location with 3d objects in my sketch.
The cones are scaled to be 25% of the scale of the sphere. Additionally, the cones are placed to outline one quarter of the sphere’s circumference.
Conceptually, I chose to use a sphere because it is similar to the shape of a head or brain. I chose the color blue because it was bright and represents a healthy mind. I chose to use cones because they are pointy and are placed to be impeding on the sphere. This represents how mental illnesses can hurt someone even if they look bright and happy. I also chose to make the cones red because it is a threatening color.
Artist Question:
How can I make my design show the contrast between the cones and the sphere, or emphasize the 25%, without using as alarming colors as I did?
if you don’t want to use the strong colors you currently have you could use shape or the way the shapes are arranged to help show the difference! for example you could fill a quarter of the sphere instead or have the cones take up space inside the sphere instead of along the perimeter
You could change the color of the spheres to be contrasting but less alarming and you could animate the cones to go in and out of the sphere to show the contrast.
I think you could make it less alarming by using slightly more muted colors, since the cyan is very bright. I like Olivia’s idea to fill up a quarter of the sphere too, I think it could better illustrate the 25%.
You could have the cones rotate so they all the points pointing towards the circle to emphasize it a bit more and make it look like it’s directed at the “head”
I agree with Braden. Pointing cones directly at the head can give an impression of the seriousness of AMI (since it will look likes spikes going into the head).
You could overlap the cones or have the sphere see through so if they curve around the circle we can still see them.
I agree with the others that using slightly less extreme colors would be good, and that it would be cool to find a way to integrate the cones into the sphere in some way.
Like what the others said, it would be nice to see some kind of interaction between the cones and the sphere to better see the distinction
To make the colors seem less harsh, you can try adjusting the background color or playing around with the attributes of the gridshape. In the attributes you can try adding lighting, or using different materials to give the shapes a different look and feel.