This week we revisited our first week’s project and worked on the visual design. The app I created helps people who travel a lot to use the foreign currency change they’re left with before leaving the country, for something that matters to them. The mobile app offers users to either donate it to a cause that they care about, or spend it on something in the in-app store.
Monday - I’ve learned that visual design is not only about making something look pretty and its not only concerned with aesthetics. I’ve learned more about how the brain works and Gestalt theory, which has to do with the relationship between visual communication and perception. Gestalt was the result of a psychological investigation into how human beings derive meaning from what they see. We’ve also talked about semiotics and ‘sign’, ‘signifier’ and ‘signified’, which I’ve already knew from my classes at uni.
I then worked on creating a mood board for my mobile app, as well as writing word associations, both in order to kick start the visual design process. I was thinking of how I’d like the user to feel when using the app. I stared thinking about colours, fonts and visual elements.
On Monday we also talked about brands and Tricia introduced us to the concepts of ‘brand personality, ‘brand affinity’ and ‘semantic differential’. I thought of what are the qualities that I want my brand to represent and how do I deliver those through my app design; what would the voice and tone be. I was able to further define the personality of my brand by referencing people, things, and other brands with which I feel kinship. What also helped was describing the limits of the personality traits in terms of a more extreme trait, or in other words defining what I don’t want it to be.
Tuesday - I’ve learned about alignment, grouping and hierarchy and had the task to create a poster from a list of given elements.
Tricia talked about the importance of photography, illustrations and iconography and then dived into the field of typography. I familiarised myself with the different type faces and learned that should NEVER EVER use comic sans. We talked about colour and what meaning they convey, as well as the different colour systems RGB and CMYK.
That day I was also doing my flash talk, which was on ‘the gut’ and the relationship between our gut and mind. It was fun and think people enjoyed it as it’s not something you hear about a lot.
We also went to Somerset House to see BIG BANG DATA exhibition, which was awesome. I was fascinated about the massive scale of big data and its complexity, but also surprised that the exhibition didn’t talk enough about IOT (Internet of things). Anyhow, I really enjoyed our field trip and thought the exhibition was great!
Wednesday - I created a style tile, which included adjectives associated with my brand personality, colours, typefaces, textures, button styles and icons. I also moved from wireframes to mockups and defined the design objectives.
This was one of my first attempts to create a style tile, which as you can see later on changed a lot.
Thursday - I’ve learned about design analysis and I was asked to analyse the design of a classmate and give feedback. I also created a questionnaire, which purpose was to understand how others perceive the designs I’ve worked. Both the analysis and the questionnaire results were really useful feedback to improve my designs. One of the main comments was about the colour, which made me think a lot and finally decide to change it (from pastel purple to bright orange). I chose orange because it tends to stimulate activity and is associated with joy, warmth, creativity, expression and many more positive qualities.
I then had the evening to finalise 3 screens of my mobile app.
Friday - My design objectives were: 1) to convey excitement, in relation to my brand personality; 2) to stimulate activity, hence the orange colour and call to action buttons; 3) to look contemporary - choice of typefaces, textures and buttons; 4) to be easy to navigate - main menu visible at all times, back button available.
Here’s the finalised style sheet and mockups.
After presenting my design, I got a lot of useful feedback on how to improve it. I was told to work on the ‘Causes’ page and offer more information, such as charity name, cause name and possibly rating & share, than just pictures. I also need to work on the ‘specific cause’ page and once again include more information such as charity rating (which I can easily use an API for), what results has this charity/cause already achieved as in clarifying for the user whether it’s worth putting their money in it.
I’ve got a lot of ideas on how to improve the app and I’m super excited to work on them! Read the Case Study to find out the changes I started working on.
