App Design – WIP

The rundown: Create a new App, showcasing the various screens needed to navigate with UX/UI in mind.

The concept: Out of 3 different ideas, the one I chose to work on actually came from a conversation at work where a lady I have some great, funny conversations with told me her super-power is being able to see thought bubbles over people’s heads. I asked if she could see what was in those thought bubbles and she said, “no” to which I replied, “that sounds like a pretty lame super-power”. She then asked what my super-power was, I told her it’s being a curmudgeon. Thus the idea for this app was born: you can take pictures of people and select a thought bubble for them from a list of options available from a sliding scale that vary from being cute to you being seen as an awful person.

The week started out with a lot of research, mapping out the process the app would follow, and trying to keep it simple and uncluttered. I then moved onto creating a logo and icons.

Image art

App name

iOS

Android

Text looked way too wonky for my liking, so I chose not to distort it and went with straight text instead:

 

Website in a Week!

Thankfully this project was meant to use WordPress. Unlucky for me, I do not know that much about building business websites for WordPress!

The specifications require a 4 page WordPress site, some social media presence would be a great additional option. I set out looking at different themes for the site, but couldn’t find anything that really stood out. The company is a travel agency, so I wanted to go with something a little more image-driven to showcase the beauty of foreign landscapes. After reading about the Lodestar theme and seeing how easy it would be to convert to a business site, I went with that. It has a solid grid-like structure which is perfect for lots of images and can be easily navigated by scrolling down the homepage or clicking the menu links to pull up individual pages. You can see the finished site here: https://kingfishertravel.wordpress.com

I have a lot of my own pictures from my travels, which I retouched in Photoshop to really make them pop. The logo came from a previous project that I fine-tuned a little. For the services section, I was having a hard time getting the 2 columns to line up symmetrically and had to actually adjust some of the HTML to make it work… which makes me glad I know enough about HTML and CSS to be dangerous. Once the structure was in place it was easy to add the content in, which is why I guess WordPress is so popular. I also set up a Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account for the business posting some of the images on the pages which received a strong response on Instagram.

EagleStream Completion

I narrowed down the last round of 40 sketches to 2 designs. The first design I tried to build in Illustrator was looking too bulky and heavy. I really wasn’t like that connotation for a streaming media application. I moved onto option two which was one of my favorites because it struck me as being sleek and clean.

 

The “e/s” logo was the original idea, connecting one point to another in an unbroken stream down. I wanted to use a typeface for the full logo that maintained the circle theme, but didn’t want to waste time trying to find the perfect font. So I went about creating all the letters, maintaining 30 and 60 degree increments as cut-off points and keeping the same thickness of the letters throughout (which would have been hard to do with a stock typeface).

The logo was in good shape at this point, but still wasn’t great. I mocked it up at this point and it was too tight. I went back into the logo file and opened it up a bit more to create more space around each letter and aid in readability.

I then went back into my mock-ups to see the changes.

EagleStream – preliminary sketches

Preliminary Sketches

EagleStream is going to be a streaming service provided by Wake Tech and a logo is needed. I tried to keep it simple, thinking about App icons and trying to stand out in such a small space.

Roughs

Of the 40 original sketches submitted 8 were selected to expand upon. Some involved the initials, others involved eagles, or simple icons with a “play” or “wi-fi” symbol. I shouldn’t have limited myself to 5 sketches per original concept because there were a couple where I felt like I was on a roll and could’ve kept exploring where the sketches were leading me, but I wrongly decided to get at least 5 then try to add-on these extra ideas at the end, making it hard to duplicate that spark of creativity. I did end up getting 2-3 out of this stage that I impressed myself with.

Think Big Conference (part 2)

The sketching, the word mapping, the preliminary work is all done. I can in thinking the rest would be easy… until I started creating everything in Illustrator. It took a few tries to get the right look to my triangle logo and it also took a lot of trial and error with color selection.

I tried to keep the colors monochromatic and came across some great blue combinations, which did not work in the logo. I went to a complimentary color combo and  said to myself, “I use this combination way too much” so I branched out a little into some uncharted territory. For the conference I changed the logo slightly to create something with a little more of a platform to it, mostly for advertisement purposes.

There was also another idea that came through in my sketches that got added into the mix, but since it’s to be used as a supplemental graphic, I simplified the concept from what it had been when it was meant for a main piece. The idea of connections and networking led me to this graphic which I had to extended a little:

Once these pieces were done, the mock-ups came together pretty easily. First up was a billboard ad which I tried first without the gray connection background and it was way too boring. The steel water bottle intended as swag was pretty straight-forward and I tried it without the background as well, but the connection graphic was sorely needed here as well. Once I got to the canvas bag, I didn’t even think about trying it without the background.

37195891 – aluminum bottle water isolated white background

 

Think Big Conference

The “Think Big Conference” is coming to town. I decided to focus on a few keywords such as: innovation, invention, collaboration, teamwork, unity, openness, ideas, problem-solving, helping, logistics, technology, and simplification. Think Big serves as an open arena for people in the non-profit industry to share their struggles, their triumphs, and network to make new connections to help solve problems for their organizations, for others, and the world. I gave myself one limitation: no handshakes. Here are the original sketches. The circled ones are the winning ideas.

Created by DPE, Copyright IRIS 2009

From here I sought to refine these ideas, which proved difficult for me. The arrows and light bulbs seemed too cliché, and anything with a brain was a little macabre. The linked ideas seemed to fit; I liked the thought of being greater than the sum of all these parts, the connections, the logistics. While working with this idea I thought of creating a heart shape in the negative space between all the different “players”. I was content with this idea, but really liked the impossible shape idea and the thought started to emerge of how I could make those work…

I started putting my better ideas into poster concepts with the first being the linked individuals/processes. I feel this idea is good, but could be better. Maybe by adding more icons around to fill up the space I could make this a little better. It would give it the idea of complex situations being solved by a symphony of moving pieces, all interconnected.

The next couple of poster concepts used impossible shapes and this was a great lesson in what I liked and did not like. For the first one, I liked the idea of a person walking along a straight path, while others on their impossible shapes (stuck in their silos) watched with confusion and possible envy at how easy this person had it. It represents gain and ease through “thinking big,” or thinking outside of one’s silo, where many languish in their same vicious cycles – day in, day out. For the second poster using this same theme, I got a little too cute and lost sight of the message along the way. I used square shapes, interwoven, but they still seem difficult and confusing. Not the connotation I would like “Think Big” to have.

Created by DPE, Copyright IRIS 2009

Created by DPE, Copyright IRIS 2009

Poster 4 was a little bit of a departure and has a sort of Emerald City theme; however, this one fell out of favor with me. Have you ever had someone say something about how something looks, and from that point on, every time you look at that one thing, you see that same image that you never saw before until that person brought it up? I look at all my brain sketches now and testicles. Thanks Mr. Dockery.

This last page saw me exploring a billboard concept with the impossible shapes floating around the straight platform (top). From here the idea just started rolling and I thought of doing a 3 part ad series for say, a subway platform (middle). I decided to create a smaller, more simplified version for social media ads, since they’re viewed on such small screens (bottom left) and it was here that I felt I was getting closer to a possible logo or graphic for this particular conference. This simplified visual with social media campaign can easily be incorporated onto some conference giveaways like T-shirts, hats, mugs, water bottles, etc.

Short Branding Project

Having downloaded a logo with a need to create a T-shirt and 2 other branding items in 30 minutes, I started looking for free mock-ups online under my usual sites. Once I got them all downloaded and unzipped, I tried to open the logo in Photoshop… except it would not open. Something about parsing. I tried Illustrator and still no dice. Watching the seconds tick away, I decided to open it in Paint and saved it as a PNG file. Boom! Back in business. Except by this time I was about 20 minutes in and just starting on putting the logo on the bag I chose. A good choice for heading to the pool I thought. Next up was the T-shirts, then the hat, because sometimes your hair’s a mess when getting out of the pool and you don’t want to bother with. Total time to gather all of these into a PDF… 50 minutes. I did miss the 30 minute time limit, but know better for next time.

What’s all this then?

As I embark on my final semester of class, I’m realizing the thought process behind every nuance of every design is becoming exceedingly important. I tend to get pretty consumed with these processes and at times there are “Eureka” moments, and at other times it becomes more challenging than I would like. More often than not it seems that when I start sketching something it leads to me saying, “well, I don’t like that at all!” which, once I have fully exhausted everything I don’t like, the only things left must surely be good concepts! I hope to capture these sorts of thoughts here in this blog, not simply to explain my work, but – possibly more importantly – to keep a journal of where I’ve been for my own personal growth. I can be very thoughtful and intentional about certain things, and I’m not saying that everything turns out great because of this, or that I never miss a detail, but it will be interesting to track how my perceptions change as I progress through this journey. In a way, the design process is a metaphor for life, but I guess anything could be, really.