When I had originally set out to make this data visualization, I had come up with many different ideas, from a interactive beer visualization to a comic history visualization. In the end I went back to my roots and did what I love, illustration. This idea came to me when I ran across the Facebook application entitled “sketch me” . This application essentially allowed you to input a picture and basically get a cheesy filtered version of that picture that looked like a sketch. My idea was to take that concept and add a very authentic/modern feel to the very factory produced idea that it was. I created a blog post on my personal blog, SKETCHES , that basically called for everyone to send me a link to a picture that they wanted sketched. That became my data, the person, the specific picture, and any details they wanted in their sketch, I would deliver but in my own specific style.
I really wanted to create a piece that had a lot of personal value to it, not only for me as the maker but for the people who took the time to request a sketch and pick a specific picture to be done. By taking these emotions and encapsulating them into three parts I felt that I was able to not only interpret their data as a group, but individually as well. The data does not carry much weight in the way of showing contrasting views on a subject, but what I do think it contains in it is a personal experience that cannot be described in a simple survey or poll. Each piece of data that I sketched became a shared experience, as I took the image that they had chosen and tried to interpret it in a way that would please both the sender and myself.
