LAND+FOOD+PEOPLE

This is a poster or postcard designed to spread information about this blog and food related issues in America and especially NYC.

There are three levels of textual information. The first is simply the season, and is designed to be read from a distance of 100 feet. The second level of information contains the food available during that season, and this is meant to be read while walking from a distance of 20 feet. The final level of information is text from the A-Z project, and the text involves more storytelling surrounding issues of local farming and farms. This text is meant to be read while standing in front of the truck or meandering slowly through Union Square while the market is in operation.

Pockets of the Manhattan City Grid are falling into the land to expose the farmland underneath the grey grid in locations roughly that of existing farmer’s markets.

The text within this illustration reads as follows: This possible direction for the food vectors involves the language of the city grid extending into the image of farmland. During this extension, the city squares and rectangles will transform into the food vectors. Seasonal abundance or scarcity will be represented through the information of the food graphic: Summer and Fall seasons will have more food graphics than Winter and Spring in accordance with the fact that local farms provide a greater or lesser abundance diversity depending on the season.

The vector tracing of Manhattan and the Boroughs  map that is applied to the truck.

This is a quick look at the truck in Union Square. The photos were taken on Friday, April 4th

There are a couple things to say about the creative development of these food pixels. The decision to place the image of the land within these pixels as a form of information visualization was born more out of necessity than anything. The resolution on the images of the land we are using for each season on the truck are going to be too small to hold up with any pictorial clarity at the scale of the truck.

Placing the image within these food pixels solved a few design problems. The visual representation of the seasonal food can now be graphic instead of photographic, and the initial viewing of the truck will remain that of an image of the land/farm. As a viewer/customer with closer inspection the seasonal food pixel graphics will literally become evident within the images of the land.

Here is our second sketch of the truck design. It primarily reflects the placement issues we have resolved so far, and not the final image/type treatment. Each side of the truck will illustrate 2 different seasons (Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter), connected in the middle by a grid representing Manhattan and portions of Queens and Brooklyn. Additionally, a map of farm locations will exist on the back of the truck, with road lines wrapping around the edges and onto the sides, to further emphasize the connectedness of the farms to the city.

A grid of “food pixels”—small vector drawings illustrating the foods available in a given season—will be used to construct the final landscape images.

The season images haven’t been chosen yet. The ones we have now are placeholders.

Spring

Summer

The back of the truck will contain the current map of farm locations for farms connected with the Greenmarket.

Farm location map

Winter

Fall

1. Produce a truck design that is dynamic and can change appropriately with the market - some information will remain static yet there will be room for storytelling and seasonal updates.

2. Concern with the maintenance of such design - will Greenmarket employees have the time/desire to edit/manage/generate seasonal content for the truck.

3. All proposed designs must be bolted directly on to the truck - this is the only way they will fit in the budget.

4. Adhere to the truck’s program of providing accurate, seasonal, information. Priority - first, Greenmarket in general and second, farms in particular. This hierarchy is tenuous. Both Greenmarket and Farm vendors don’t exist without the other. Their ability to feed off each other is a different power dynamic than the industrial food machine. Point to this interconnectedness through the design. This connection is instinctually how every customer knows the market to be different from Whole Foods, etc.

5. Consider the weather, the potential for graffiti tagging, informational bickering amongst vendors, the inability to properly edit - a spiraling of content out of control.

6. There is a difference between advertising and a community bulletin board. Where is that difference? How to walk that fine line. How to maintain a collective spirit within the competetive arena of the vendor? Does each vendor get the opportunity to post on their own space, do we create the divide, the container? Can this work as a physical blog? Person + Internet Posting = Anonamous Asshole. How can Vendor + Bulletin Board = Seasonally specific opportunity for Customer and Farmer alike?

The Truck

The Map

Below are some really horrible sketches that I made in an application I don’t know how to use yet (indesign) Erika is going to prove that she is the graphic designer by posting the visually appropriate version of this sketch in the next few days.

I have to write about these images because they look so horrible. We are talking about the layers of information that will be contained on the truck. Something we are intent on executing is this notion that the tuck doesn’t have to just be a billboard - that the images, maps, and graphics can in fact be containers for the farmers and residents of the city to tell their own stories about the land, food and related people. This design is not ironed out in the least, but the goal is to facilitate a more dynamic interaction with these narratives and move away from the static advert that it is in danger of becoming.

These photographs were taken by Joan, who is a farm inspector for Greenmarket. While she is traveling around checking out the farms, June takes some pretty spectacular images of the land, food and farmers. I will be posting possible choices for use on the truck. Right now we are looking at using just one image per season.

Winter

Spring

Summer

Fall