The Project

This project was developed in my information design class. The assignment was to make an interactive map of any place you want and using any data you want. I wanted my interactive map to show unique data to a place I hold dearly in my heart. I grew up 45 minutes outside of the city and because my mom was an actress we traveled into the city for commercial and movie auditions. I grew up watching tons of different genres of films and some of my favorites took place 45 minutes down the road from me in that magical city of lights.

Based on this inspiration, my topic for this project was created, My Favorite New York City Movies.

The Process

I started this project by sketching the outline of NYC, and determining how much of the city I wanted to include in my design. I decided I was only going to stick to the island of Manhattan not only to simplify the design, but because most of the movies I liked in NYC, took place mainly in Manhattan.

My next step was film selection; which ones I wanted to include, how many I wanted, and where they landed on my scale from most favorite to least. I eventually landed on 15 of my most favorite movies filmed in Manhattan and I ranked them from most to least favorite.

Once I knew what movies I was including, I wanted to add specific data I thought would be relevant in terms of Popular New York City films. My data on each film included the location of famous scenes, the lead actors, budget for the film, director, year released and the rotten tomatoes score.

I created all the graphics in Adobe Illustrator and animated them in figma. I wanted each individual film to be highlighted when the mouse glides over its picture on the map. This took a lot of different visuals to make in Illustrator and once I got those I was able to structure and animate my design.

After a few rounds of feedback from in class critiques, I was able to make adjustments to the design; the typeface, the colors and location icons to really finalize the design.

Overall, I can say pursuing a project you have a deep passion for, always makes designing more meaningful. I truly had a wonderful time producing this digital interactive and proud I have a project that showcases a niche interest of mine.

Below is an overall visual of how the animation flows: