#ixd304

Narrative is one of the most important parts of designing an immersive experience. It draws the user into a brand-new world and takes them on a journey through a complete rich experience related to the content of the story. This is not easy to do, however, it’s good to look at different people that have carried this out and made full use of an immersive experience to their advantage. 

Take a look at Josh Worth’s horizontal scroller ‘If the moon were only 1 pixel’ which takes the concept of having the moon be a single pixel in size and accurately calculate the correct size and distance between planets in our solar system with this frame of measurement in mind. I personally think it’s a great site as it drew my attention in instantly and made me want to keep scrolling through. This is because Josh has kept the art direction of his site subtle to not let anything overpower the concept and content. It immerses the user instantly as the complete black colour of the site makes you think of the black openness of space and how vast and empty it really is. The entire site stays consistent from what it offers, simple but super effective.

Another example to look at is the Big Apple Hotdogs website. The website focuses on advertising their brand of hotdogs, but they carry it out in such a cute and interesting way. They have a very unique scrolling technique which instantly immerses you as each hot dog character connects with one another each time you scroll into a new section. It keeps the user interested and fully engaged which ultimately gets them interested in the product. If each section didn’t carry this out, then I don’t think it would be as fully immersive to keep the user fully captivated. Another good thing they do to immerse you in is create these cute little characters in the forms of hotdogs with each one having their own style and personality that fits each different type of hotdog they are selling. This not only ties with the brand but keeps the user interested as each part of info about each hotdog is accompanied with its own style of character.

Narrative Website part 1 

For my Heroes and Villans website I decided to go with a simplistic black and white theme as I feel it was best suited to the mysterious atmosphere I wanted to create for my audience. 

I chose to draw my characters in a simplistic line drawing style as so they would appear as Sillhouettes. Usually for my designs I would use Adobe Illustrator but I decided to switch back to an old friend of mine Affinity photo , overall I found Affinity much easier to use than adobe , but i did miss a lot of the features that adobe has to offer.

I built my narrative website using webflow , and if you remember previously I used webflow to create my portfolio site. This time round I found Webflow much easier to use. 

In todays lecture, we discussed narratives and how they can be used within print and film. We started off with the topic, the blurring of lines. Within this we were shown the Netflix animated introduction and how effective this animation was in setting a scene. How it begins with letter ‘N’ and then how it zooms straight up to the letter displaying a variety of lines, all in many colours. 

Then we looked at the work of Simon Wild and Annie Atkins from the film the Grand Budapest Hotel. These asset followed an amazing design, from the typography straight through to the colour scheme of pink and blue. A very nice design to possibly use for my prototype.

Afterwards, we discussed the power of pause. In my opinion this was a very interesting topic and I really enjoyed discussing it. How by saying or doing nothing for a moment can add suspense or calmness in a design. An example we talked about was the soundtrack to the movie Jaws. How the song begins slow and steady, with long pauses to indicate the mood is calm. But then how the tempo and the paste speeds up and the pauses gets quicker and slowly fade, the mood completely changes to suspense and danger. This is the same with design. I really liked this comparison as it made it easier to understand.

In week 3 of our lecture for IXD304, we were introduced to the concept of Art Direction. It was a really interesting topic to discuss. Art Direction is the process that happens before design. A visual designer has to implement the direction in which the art/design is heading. An example we used was travelling to Venice. There are many different ways of travelling to Venice, you can go by a Ryanair  aeroplane, which would take you one way without stopping. Or you can travel by the orient express which has many stops and locations to pass through. The point is that the destination is the same, but the journey isn’t. This is the also the case with art direction. It is all down to your decision. 

So within this art direction, I have to ask myself I few questions like:

What outcome to I want? 

Who are the (users) characters 

What are the backstories (personas)?

What do I want to happen on the website?

These are the things I need to decide for my own art direction. 

Then we discussed briefly style tiles/guides. Style Tiles are a design deliverable consisting of fonts, colours and interface elements that communicate the essence of a visual brand for a website. Within them, they should involve the typography used within the project/design and the colours and fonts. An element collage would also be useful to create, to get an idea or a feel of what art direction you are going down. My element collage can be found within my sketches. I also created a visual grammar/ style guide which can be found in one of my previous blog posts.

https://ellieclarke01.tumblr.com

Our final critique today Kyle give me a couple more suggestions of what to change. He suggested that I double check that everything was lined up on each page, so that way when going through the content it would all line up when switching through the pages. He also advised I add a little line under the titles to make them more clear as a title like below;