Mina Popa

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Portfolio Project #1
Information Design: Inventory
22 September–21 October 2025
COORD: Arnolfini / Bower Ashton Library / Bristol Central Library / Centre Space / homeThis chapter is all about new beginnings, hurdles and adjustments, and learning to fall in love with a new city by playing cat-and-mouse with curiosity. In more detail, it’s about the journey of embarking on my MA Design Communication: Graphic Design course at UWE Bristol and completing my first portfolio project. En accompagnement, the inner musings of a self-taught designer coming to terms with the right to exist and create.




Our first task as fresh MA Design Communication: Graphic Design students was the following: Respond thoughtfully and creatively to the concept of an inventory in order to present a piece of design that expresses something meaningful about you. A task set to teach us about information design, visual hierarchy, gathering research and ways of interpreting data.

But, first things first, what is information design?

‘According to the Society for Experiential Graphic Design (SEGD), Information Design is “… the practice of presenting information in a way that makes it most accessible and easily understood by users.”’ (Boffa, 2020). And, secondly:

What do I want to share about myself?


It’s difficult to decide what kind of information you want to relay to others, complete strangers, about you that can reveal something of value about the kind of person you are. When thinking what I should make the subject of my inventory, there were a lot of ideas floating in my head. Ideas such as the amount of times I borrow, renew or return a book to the library, mapping the genres, amount of time kept, and how long I actually spent reading it from the moment they've been taken out, or, how many times do I say my ‘Word of the Month’, at what times, and how does my partner react each time.

Most of my ideas stemmed from current trends about myself, and as a result, I did not feel like they could convey something of depth about the kind of person that I was. I wanted to use something about me that was intrinsic, a piece of myself that I have carried with me since the beginning of time.
I rummaged on this for quite a while. I possess the fatal flaw of wanting to be perceived as an interesting person, and every piece that I create must, as such, be a testament to this standard. I wanted to be in control of people’s first impression.

The thought of ‘first impressions’, however, lingered in my mind. And the more I thought of it, the more it unlocked new ideas. I realised, then, that for my peers this is the first time they see me. They form a judgement on my past and the kind of person I am by looking at the current version of myself. I might, for all they know, have always looked like this.

When I, in fact, have not.



I don’t look like myself from only four weeks ago. I don't look like myself from four months ago. And I definitely don’t look like myself from four years ago. I’m in a constant stream of change, shapeshifting depending on my environment, life events and my inner world. The way I respond to that has always been hair.

The first transformation of my hair at fifteen (ripe) years of age marked the beginning of my freedom of expression. Maybe it’s a Leo thing (when I choose to believe in it, depending on the horoscope), but the thrill of standing out through a new ‘mane’ stirred in me a deep desire to continue altering it. Through it, I’ve constantly building my identity and confidence, reflecting my inner monologue and creating a catalogue of self-expression.

Connected to this idea, I then decided to create the presentation for our second session around it. I quickly sketched a prototype of my piece, too.













Diary notes:
Presented the slides on my idea to great success (?). No significant feedback was given, so one can only assume that it was alright.

Feedback for others included:

(1) Narrowing down the subject: It seems mine was straight to the point and mapped out what I was interested in showcasing and exploring clearly enough.
(2) Make it more personal: It doesn’t get more personal than the hair on my head.
(3) Make sure you can translate it into a piece of information design: It is possible that my sketch does that sufficiently well.

UPDATE: Despite that seemingly being all well and good, I’m not used to being told ‘it’s a good idea, just go do it’. This has had me in self-doubt paralysis for the rest of the week. My brain, of course, decided that that feedback meant it was NOT a good idea — it was, in fact, an idea so bad that could not stir any further conversation.

Not much was done for the rest of the week, besides ignoring my sketch and choosing fonts.

Initial sketch of my Inventory project idea
Despite the initial hurdle, I began my research by taking out one of our core reading books from the library, the 2009 edition of Information is Beautiful by David McCandless. I was determined to read until I reach either one of two conclusions:

(1) That I should completely, radically uproot my idea and change it to something with a more suitable subject matter or,

(2) that I should persevere because the theory around it supports it.

Information is Beautiful (McCandless, 2009)

I was really drawn to visual representation that used colour to form patterns, or objects to show scale. Using an almost pixelated heat map to inform where things find themselves on a spectrum intrigued me and I considered using it the format to map out my ‘Vitals’: that is, the feelings that can be assigned to a hairstyle at a point in time using units of measurement such as Joy, Fear, Loneliness and Gender. 

This research, though informative, didn’t answer the question of art direction. 




A Week of Indecision (Posavec, 2015)


A Week of Complaints (Posavec, 2015)

A Week of Goodbyes (Posavec, 2015)

For that, I kept looking back at one of the projects introduced to us during our lectures with Harriet Hand: Dear Data (2015) by Stefanie Posavec and Georgia Lupi. Watching their opening panel on the project at Eyeo Festival 2015, I was mesmerised by its hand crafted feel and personal touch. 

Its beauty, of course, comes from two information designers meeting serendipitously and deciding to stay connected and still learn about each other, even while living continents apart. However, their commitment to manually recording everything and hand drawing each postcard with the intention of creating a display of data that could, in the absence of a legend, work as an illustrative piece on their own really resonated with me. It gave data a human touch (a theme that will become central to my work later in the term).

That felt like the missing piece. 

The fact that many of the examples from McCandless’ books were vectorised didn’t fit the bill for the vision that I was going for, not when the subject matter was so intimate in the themes it displayed. However, still unsure of my idea at this point, I prepared a couple of typographic choices and illustration styles — one that would lean towards a rougher, sketchier style and one that would fit better with vector illustrations.



Diary notes:
13 October Horoscope: You might feel an unexpected wave of sensitivity today, Leo. Old insecurities could surface, but that’s not a setback—it’s a release. Use this emotional insight to reconnect with what fuels your confidence, not what drains it. Growth often starts with tenderness. (Fike, 2025)




Coming in with my stylistic explorations in our next session, albeit crude, opened up the opportunity for my peers to help me gain confidence in my idea. The feedback I received seemed to support my initial thoughts, and people felt as drawn to the hand-drawn style and its ability to tell the story behind my inventory as I was. 






In the coming days, most of my time was divided into conducting research and creating an initial draft of my design. I worked my way through my entire photo archive (comprised of a humble 18,236 photos of myself) to collate a solid database of all my hair styles, colours and lengths with dates and locations. Even more tediously and emotionally draining was flipping through endless pages of heavy diary entries, some of which revealed to me long-forgotten versions of myself, all while painstakingly recording my feelings using one of my units of measurement on a 0-5 intensity scale.

Once my dataset was complete, I finally moved on to designing. I sketched various strands of hair in my trusty Procreate, then moved the drawing into InDesign where I started placing my text. I opted to go for Comico by Fontshare, as the letterforms and embedded marker-like texture of it resembled my own handwriting, which made it the perfect vessel for my auto-biographical project.

After dividing the page into grids, I placed the years and seasons on the time axis, created a hair in centimeters axis and then worked on my own pixelated heatmap inspired by McCandless’ data visualisations. I opted to go for colours of the non-binary flag, a nudge to fellow queer viewers that would pick up on the inference.
However, once I printed out my poster, some issues started to arise:

  • (1) I had chosen the tinted blacks of my poster via Procreate’s RBG colour wheel on an old screen with low colour fidelity. When converted to CMYK for printing, the original colours blended together.

  • (2) This was the same in the case of the colours chosen for the heatmap: though truthful to my queer identity, there wasn’t enough contrast between three out of the four shades (not great!), especially when more of them at high opacity were close to one another.

  • (3) And though nit-picky, I also didn’t enjoy the boxed in nature of the frame. The elements within the composition felt restrained, clashing visually with the flowiness of the hair. 


A small part of the colour sampling done before working on my next revision




As the final outcome needed to be printed, for our final submission I wanted to make sure that the colours would show up correctly. Thanks to our InDesign workshops where we learned about creating swatches and mixing colours (just in the nick of time), I was able to use this new-found knowledge and create my very own colour chart based off my photo collection. 

Something interesting that I noticed while choosing my final photos to use as reference and creating colour swatches is the role that memory played in my selection. Most of the pictures chosen didn’t display colour and length most accurately; similarly, colours weren’t mixed to the highest fidelity either. Rather, the photos and colours I’d chosen were the ones that rekindled in me the strongest memory of what that hairstyle felt and meant to me.Once done, I then imported that swatch into Procreate and began refining my illustrations. Something that changed during this time is the rendering style. In my early composition tests, despite choosing to go for something hand-drawn, I strayed away from any linework and instead opted to emulate a vector-like illustration style. They were, however, too dark and didn’t express the same honesty as my original sketch.

For the final rendition of my hair, I chose to mix and create brushes that would help me produce a traditional illustration effect digitally, through combining watercolour brushes, ink liners and halftone textures.

I took that treatment to the rest of the elements of my graph, replacing the perfect lines I created in InDesign with marker lines. It was also during this revision that I decided to drop the ‘Vitals’ and heatmap as they didn’t fit with the new composition and instead continue down the journal-like trajectory by incorporating copy of key moments related to different hair strands.






Diary entry:

I’ve been finding it really difficult to trust my own ideas and creative intuition.


One last library session, just in case

Wachstum einer Avocado (Growth of an Avocado), ‘Datalogy’, Data Flow (Klanten, 2008)

Despite somewhat enjoying the process—as much as one can while suffering from the worst case case of impostor syndrome known to man—, I found it really difficult to sit with my idea and trust that it delivers something meaningful enough, or in a compelling enough way. I had thoughts of deleting my files about three times a day and dreamt that my laptop would internally combust before my very eyes every time I pressed Cmd + Save.

In the eleventh hour before our final poster showcase and subsequent exhibition in the post-graduate studio on the fifth floor of the Arnolfini, I returned to the library and equipped myself with a stack of books in the hopes that a better, more appealing and meaningful idea would materialise if I just read one (or five) more books.

To my surprise and no one else’s, while reading Robert Klanten’s Data Flow (2008), I came across a design titled Wachstum einer Avocado (Growth of an Avocado) that shifted my whole view upside down. As I looked at this work in which the subject matter was showcasing data about itself using its own image, a feeling of relief seemed to wash over me.

It was, perhaps, possible, and not unthinkably boring to visualise data this way. I took the bus to Frenchay and printed my poster. The A0 plotters in there are magical and affordable, and I will never shut up about UWE City Campus also having one.


Exhibition on the fifth floor of the Arnolfini



I will probably forever reference infamous chaotic art philosopher and YouTuber CJ the X (if they ever have no fans, know that I am dead), but during times of crisis and creative uncertainty, I find myself reciting parts of their 7 Deadly Art Sins (2022) video essay like sermons from the Bible:

‘Relinquishing your control of your art object and subjecting yourself to the horrifying ordeal of being known is the only way to [do] it [art].’

is what I was telling myself as I was anxiously gripping onto the paper before letting it be pinned to the wall. Seeing it alongside all of my peers’ wonderful Inventory projects I began feeling as if it, too, belonged and it was now no longer just mine, but part of the experience that we were creating together.
Diary entry:

Just as I was leaving today, I thought it would be nice to drop in and check out the new exhibition ‘Everything is Energy’ by Emma Talbot at the Arnolfini. How very peculiar... serendipitous, if you will. That despite the abstract forms and connections to nature, there are all these depictions of hair. Long, luscious hair, even on creatures that would otherwise not possess it.

Surely, I’m to take this as a sign.

Steve was right: sometimes even simple ideas are great.


Generative Plant (Talbot, 2025)
Are You a Living Thing That Is Dying, or a Dying Thing That Is Living? (Talbot, 2025)
The Grief Tree (Talbot, 2025)


In the weeks over Christmas break, I revisited A Brief Recollection of Time Through Hair with fresher and kinder eyes before our final assessment hand-in. With a lot more knowledge from the other sessions throughout the term and the accuracy of a design eye that can only form through repeated practice (I was, at this point in time, working on our motion brief, creating my manifesto, doing research on typography, completing a freelance book commission and working as a part-time content creator at the uni), I only made minor changes to the final piece. More empathetic to my creation, myself and what my choice represented about me, I removed the text boxes and allowed the hair to flow freely with the text.This has been, for me, a project about trust, authenticity and openness. The composition evolved from a dark, unsure and restrained piece to one that is unapologetic in what it is. Removing the very last boxes and completely unfurling the elements of my design felt, methodically and metaphorically, like the most obvious decision to take.


A Brief Recollection of Time Through Hair, at last




Bibliography:

Boffa, C. (2020) What is Information Design? Design Me a Design Blog. Blog. 23 March 2020 [online]. Available from: https://designmea.design.blog/2020/03/23/what-is-information-design/ [Accessed 23 September 2025].
CJ The X dir. (2022) [Youtube]. Available from: link. [Accessed 1 November 2026].
Doudova, H., Jacobs, S., Rossler, P. and Bachmann, K. (2018) Image Factories: Infographics 1920-1945: Fritz Kahn, Otto Neurath et al. Spector Books.
Eyeo Festival dir. (2025) [Video]. Available from: link. [Accessed 1 December 2026].
Fike, A. (2025) Daily Horoscope: October 13, 2025. VICE Horoscopes. 13 October 2025 [online]. Available from: https://www.vice.com/en/article/daily-horoscope-october-13-2025/ [Accessed 13 October 2025].
Klanten, R. (2008) Data Flow: visualising information in graphic design. Berlin: Gestalten.
Lupi, G. and Posavec, S. (2015) THE PROJECT — Dear Data. Dear Data. 2015 [online]. Available from: https://www.dear-data.com/theproject [Accessed 1 November 2025].
Marchese, C. (2021) Information Design for the Common Good: Human-centric Approaches to Contemporary Design Challenges. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
McCandless, D. (2010) Information is Beautiful. HarperCollins Publishers.
McCandless, D. (2015) Knowledge is Beautiful. HarperCollins Publishers.
Pontis, S. and Babwahsingh, M. (2023) Information Design Unbound: Key Concepts and Skills for Making Sense in a Changing World. Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
Talbot, E. (2025) Are You a Living Thing That Is Dying, or a Dying Thing That Is Living?
Talbot, E. (2025) Generative Plant.
Talbot, E. (2025) The Grief Tree.

© Mina Popa 2025-2026