Wharf Portraits: Process Book & Maps

The following are (iPhone) snapshots of a process book and some maps for a project in my advance graphic design class. For this project we were put into teams of three and given a neighborhood in SF to explore. As a team we were to explore the neighborhood and document everything and anything that caught our eyes, ears and even taste buds. Then as individuals, we got to decide on what we wanted to focus on for that particular neighborhood.


I was fortunate enough to be a team with Shereen and Colby. I was dreading the fact that we were given Fisherman’s Wharf to explore, but being with Shereen and Colby made the uber touristy part of SF fun and tolerable.

On the left side of the page is a grid a photos I took on various visits to Fisherman’s Wharf. I originally wanted to do focus on the typography found in the area but it turned other students in the class wanted to do the same exact thing. Other ideas that also crossed my mind included documenting the architectural styles, plants and flowers, noises, and street performers and vendors. After going back and forth, I finally decided to focus on the caricature artists in the area. I figure this should be fun to document and maybe I can get some cool portraits right?

I went to six different artists and let’s just say I was surprised by each style of the portraits and the outcome. The picture on the far right was taken in a photobooth that same afternoon. I think it’s safe to say that the portraits on the left page don’t look much like me…What do you think?

Moving on, a big part of this project was to create macro and micro maps on our subject.

This one reflects the number of caricature artists around that world that appear in a basic google search.

As the previous map was a world view, the next two were narrow down to artists in California and then in San Francisco. I have to admit that actual information in these maps are not all that exciting or that useful. However, I think the point of the exercise was to figure out how to gather information and design maps based said information…

Here are some of the digital versions of the maps:

This one is a micro map of the project. This reflects the location of each artist I visited, mediums they used and so forth.

And this here is the final map that combines all the maps I made.

To see more images of the process book and see how the style of maps evolved, click here.