After being given large amounts of data regarding SCAD, I decided to focus on something that I have noticed about going to SCAD and something the data backs up, and that is the global presence within SCAD. I wanted to link that with the locations of active Alumni around the world using data provided by SCAD from 2013­­–2014.

 

I wanted to create a poster for SCAD that shows the great potential for graduates from SCAD, as well as the immense variety of backgrounds both entering the school and continuing on beyond the SCAD campuses. 

 

This idea developed from the idea that we are all clustered together, similar to a hive while in school, and after graduation we are able to fly off and start our own mini hives wherever we land. 

 

However, the literal use of bees was overly obvious, so the bee idea was simplified down to just the hexagon shape of a beehive and was incorporated into a more celestial diagram where the alumni began to circle, or be stars surrounding their little hive planet. 

 

The SCAD galaxy is organized alphabetically to not give precedence to a specific location being closer or farther from the sun. 

 

Within the sun cluster there is a single dot for every current student at every campus in 2013, and every dot outside the sun represents an active alumni as of the information from the 2013­­–2014 school year. 

 

There are over 175 different colors within the SCAD Galaxy, making it virtually impossible to assign a specific color to every individual country or state, so the colors were assigned systematically, and then altered depending on map location, or overall number. An example is with the states of Georgia and Florida. Since a large selection of SCAD students come from those two states, and they are next to each other in the alphabet, changing them, or even swapping them completely changed the overall look of the map. 

 

In total there are 27,165 dots for alumni, and 11,618 dots for current students. 

 

I chose to use Futura for the typeface because it worked the best with the overall concept, and helped to really bring the galaxy idea to light.