Vidhi Shah, the principal designer of the drawing board shows us how boring numbers can be enjoyable with her MTV ‘Many Me’ Project, by evolving the traditional way of showing research. Usually, it is graphs, numbers, bar charts which sometimes make it boring.
The Brief
Every two years, MTV does a study on the youth of our country to derive a very strong insight about the youth of our generation. In 2016, MTV concluded from its study that today’s youth don’t have just one trait that can define their whole personality. They are multi-faceted and unique in their own way. Keeping this conclusion in mind Vidhi was given a very simple brief:
“The idea behind this book is that people should read it without putting it down. It’s a youth study, and anyone who holds the book should remember it.”
To start this project, they needed a name. Without that, it would be hard to crack a visual language. “We came up with various different names but at last, we pinned it down to three names. From which ‘Many Me’ was finalized with help of team efforts.” says Vidhi. Many Me basically signifies that diversity of traits in each person’s identity.
Since Vidhi had already worked with MTV on various projects, she had a good grasp on their design style and boldness in color usage. Hence it was easy for her to use the vibrant colors and out of the box illustrations which are open to interpretation as per your imagination.
Positioning the data was Vidhi’s call. The main insight from this research study was that our youth is very versatile with their interests and needs.
For e.g. one can be geek still hot and enjoy watching Indian Drama shows on TV. So how to represent that in visual form was a challenge and she thought of replacing human heads with different objects such as TV Box, broken egg, Rubik’s cube, Blade, candle, gum-ball machine amongst others, that could represent the uniqueness in our personalities.
The most difficult part for Vidhi on this project was to crack infographics since she had to illustrate over 180 infographics in which designs can’t be repetitive. She completed 120 infographics within the span of one and a half week. The duration of the project was two months in which 20 days were spent in conceptualizing and the remaining 40 days in designing and improving the artwork and illustrations.
To find the inspiration, Vidhi mind maps often. When stuck with no ideas or bad ideas and she needs to think straight, mind mapping is her go-to solution. A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information. She personally thinks every designer should know this trick, as it is a very useful hack to create something out of the box.
Highlight : The Social Issues Graph
Client’s and audience were surprised by how the book turned out to be. After two months of brainstorming, hard work, the book was circulated to various top management people such as CEOs, marketing head, to understand more about the current youth generation about what they need. Everyone particularly loved the heads, and Vidhi’s personal favorite is gumball one.
