#kidscan

Over this half of semester, I feel as if I made a lot more progress compared to the first half. This half of semester begun with a bit of drama that kept me driven throughout, but my biggest challenged faced this semester was being grouped with people I didn't know. I was placed in a group with Holly, Jess and Shaista and although they are all amazing hard-working girls, it didn’t mean much because they didn’t show up to class to understand the process we are meant to be following.

Being the only member of my team that attended every lesson for this half of semester, I was deemed project manager. This was done at a very late date since I didn’t know these girls would be pulling a sickie every other week, and it caused me to have to do most the visual work myself so there will be some consistency in our work for the hand in at the end. In saying that I didn’t let them slack off, I arranged the girls so that they will be focusing on work from the day which they were here, and I’ll take what they have and collaborate their ideas with mine. I believe we got lucky for this type of system to work out the way it did, but I must give myself credit for guiding them.

The work produced at the end was to a satisfactory standard but felt as if I had done it all, one thing I would have liked to change was the amount of drawing we had of the actual mascot. I had to keep the mascot looking very simple so when I saw members of my team I could explain new concepts to them while keeping the structure of the drawing consistent. I believe that our focus was on the mascot so there should have been more of a development of it visually.

Overall, I am happy with the final results knowing they were to the highest standard that I could have done. There isn’t much more I could change to help express the potential of the mascot idea as I felt we had it all covered in the end anyway. I would like to continue this project and see how far it could actually go.

Now that we had done basic research into our chosen company, we had a better understanding of what KidsCan stood for and how they wanted to be viewed as a business, but most importantly, we learnt what the company was doing wrong to be unnoticed.

This lesson was about Mind mapping to pin point multiple areas of the KidsCan company that can be addressed with a single action. We began the mind-mapping process by branching out from what we had learnt from the research period. The very first thing Holly and I agreed had to change was website, followed very closely by the logo. 

The Website: - Is just WAY TO BORING:  - It has too many pages and links for the amount of text on some screens.  - The photos do not communicate much    *other than they want to ‘be positive’ and show that ‘sharing is caring’ - There is barely any color on the pages, and it wasn't because they where trying to use white space, if that was the case the website would be a lot tidier. - There social media links should be utilized and made easy to locate

The Logo: Once again Holly and I agreed that it was a horrible logo because its was just boring to look at. It doesn't tell you anything in the visuals about the business other than being NZ  operated, and the color scheme doesn't make sense and is far from appealing. Ultimately this logo does the company no justice as the logo is only words, and to prove it i walked around to students in class and asked them if they knew what KidsCan was. I was not surprised when i got answers like ‘childs cancer services’ or ‘an orphanage”, this quick play-test confirmed that the mind mapping starts with the logo.

How the Mascot idea sparked

Holly and I began mapping out visual components that could be used hand in hand with the website and the logo. We threw a few ideas around and one that stood out was giving the company a mascot. We questioned if a mascot could be the face of the company where he would be used on the website headers as well as being in the logo to create a new personality for the company.