OUGD503 Responsive Studio Brief 01 Individual Practice Feathr Brief Existing Entries

http://www.feathr.com/vote/P10

I went on to the voting pages on the Feathr website and took some screen shots of the entries so that I can look at what they might be missing.

This is probably one of my favourite designs on the website. This is mostly because the repeat is so interesting. I like the way it has varying intensities of line weight that suggest the presence of depth which is hard to come by in a lot of wall papers and makes sense when you think about the way that the wallpaper's depth creates the illusion that the room is bigger than it actually is, always a desirable trait.

This is quite a bizarre illustration to use as the repeat of a wallpaper but I think that is why it works. It makes very little sense but this is the very thing that makes it a talking point. This is a quality that comes from one of the criteria pointed out in the briefing; a story. It is important that the wallpaper has a story to tell or at least a reason behind it. It doesn't necessarily mean that this story has to be instantly gleaned from the design but to get the complexity and evoke that curiosity from the onlooker it needs the background of a strong concept.

I really like the visual texture and carefully thought through repeat in this design. However, when seen at full size the design looses this impact it has because the repeat is far too small to actually work from the multiple distances it needs to be viewed from.

This is another example where the repeat is just far too small. It creates a busyness that almost hurts the eyes. Not something you want from a wallpaper.

Tis is an example of the repeat just not being thought through enough. The spacing on each individual roll has been looked at but the connection between rolls has not been taken into account. This means that there are lines through the wallpaper where the motifs are much closer together than in other areas of the design.

Although the repeat of this is far too small to be visually appealing I admire the bravery of placing the motifs so close together. However, this does have its draw backs, it means  that there are numerous lines in this design. Sometimes lines can be pleasing to the eye but here I feel like perhaps the scale has stopped this from being the case. The diamond shape of the repeat mean that there is almost an isometric grid of lines throughout which stops you from seeing the contents of the pattern and the grid of lines instead, getting in the way of the communication of the story.

Once again this is a design tat I really like but just feel that the scale is all wrong. I really love the drawing style and the tactile look, possibly this is something that I could use in my designs, however, something that runs throughout all of these designs is the lack of a truly interlocking repeat patterns, something that creates the impression of no repeat at all. This is what I want to achieve with my design.

 Next I want to start jotting down ideas about stories and themes that I want to explore.

OUGD503 Responsive Feathr Wallpaper Brief

After the Visit from Feathr wallpaper, I have decided to do a wallpaper design for their competition.

http://www.feathr.com/vote/P10

The limitations of the brief are numerous. The most dominant ones are repeat and scale. The scale of the design needs to work from lots of different distances and the repeat needs to be as seamless as possible so that no lines appear when numerous rolls of the paper are pasted next to each other. Luckily as part of the submission process, Feathr have a try out area where you can play around withe the way the motif repeats and the scale it is repeated at. However, this will need to be considered at every stage of the design. I hope not to spend more than a week or so on this project because my dominant work is being done with the Leeds Arts Party and my submission to the YCN in the Fedrigoni Brief. 

The first things I want to do are think about the different stories I would want to tell with this piece and to look at the current submissions. I will already play on my existing work in the area of wall paper design and look at inverting the norms of this medium to create something entertaining and new.

Own Brief:

Create a wall paper design for the feather competition that looks to invert the norms of wallpaper design and utilises your existing knowledge of the medium. Consider the technicalities of a repeat and how your motif can do something new with the space you have. Consider its context in the home and what people want to see day to day.

OUGD503 Responsive Studio Brief 01 Individual Practice Leeds Arts Party Flyer

The flyers went to print at Awesome merchandise and I think that they turned out pretty good.

There are a few things that I would change if I could have seen a proof print, like the colour of the drop shadow is slightly green and the hand drawn type would have been really nice with a slightly more pronounced spot shine just to catch the eye.

Evaluation:

Using hand draw lettering in this brief was a justified decision in the fact that it communicated a hand crafted more human approach which fits with the message of the arts party. However, in this situation I am uncertain about how effectively it has worked in situ. I am uncertain why this is but it could be the hand drawn type on top of hand drawn type, too much perhaps. Through the development of the design I have learned about the aesthetic that the arts party wants to create and how I can best achieve this. Mostly through the use of colours it seems, although the colours are very light pastels and this can seem very girlie and soft, perhaps the colours require the harsher edges of digital design to counteract this. I also learned a lot from working with a group of people that aren't necessarily graphic designers. This means you have a few communication bridges to cross but the effort is worth it and having crit with them was a new experience entirely. I think one thing that this project highlighted was my need to step away from my work before someone critiques it. I found that working on it and then the next minuet getting a crit meant I was much less open to making changes and could (internally) get quite defensive. I am glad I have learned this about my process because now I can mediate this. I really liked helping out on the day of the showcase because I got to see the delivery of my design and gauge a response. The response was overwhelmingly positive, despite my hang up about it and this was heartening and also very motivational, just to see my work in use out side of the college.

I helped out at our stand on both days of the showcase in the mornings. As part of the set up on saturday I also did an impromptu chalk board which needed to look quite hand made and DIY. I think it worked out really well and I definitely enjoyed doing it, something to do more perhaps?

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 A Brief History Of... Final Designs and Interactive Mock Ups

I am really pleased with the way the exterior gallery has worked out. I had been struggling for some time with how to make some aspect or another interactive or allow some feedback from people who have gone on the walks. Pinterest is perfect for this because people can add to the search tag and even the board its self. This creates a community sense to the venture that generally makes the whole brans more likeable and accessible. It also means that people can get to the website through pinterest as well as the usual search engines. 

The transfer of the design to a mobile format website went really well and the simple icon usage really seems to be fitted to this function because they are just the right size to be tapped by a finger accurately. Once again the connection to pinterest  works in the mobile website context because the app for pinterest is particularly visually effective. 

I am happy with the general look of my website and quite surprised that I managed to keep it simple and clean and get the balance of earthy warmth that the subject matter deserves. I do feel that perhaps the hand rendered type could have been done a bit better but this is always the nature of hand rendered type, especially when I am still learning. The layout seems simple but when I started looking into coding I found that I would actually need a responsive design coded so that the thirds of the screen could shrink and grow and still remain proportionally correct. This would also be the case for the icon strands, they would always need to be in proportional thirds. This is imperative because the images need to be full bleed to have the impact that I desire.

General layout- like it but fully responsive coding would have to be used to do this properly (full bleed images)

The use of lower opacities rather than translucent overlays of colour or even flat colour saves me from using web safe colours which I am very thankful for as I have not found one yet that I really like. The differences in opacity are easily achieved through the use of PNG files, as introduced in our one and only coding workshop, so this aesthetic is achievable and functional.

One problem that I did encounter was the way the lightness of the sky sometimes got in the way of the icons being fully recognisable. I got around this problem by inverting translucent squares of a dark blue with a soft gradient down to transparency where the sky connects with the land. By putting tis bend the icon string it brings the white into contrast and makes them much more noticeable. This can be seen more clearly in the gifs below.

-sky has proved difficult

using all images communicate the beauty of the landscape.

Something that was mentioned in the earlier crits was the fact tat images of a place make you want to visit it and are important in convincing people to go there. I have acted on this idea by using photos as the lynch pin of the entire website and I think this has worked quite well. Apart from the obvious difficulties that full bleed images on a responsibly coded website, this is a website that would definitely make me want to visit these places.

At the beginning of this brief I decided that I wanted the feel of this website to be warm and welcoming, have the raw earthy feel of the places being referenced and be quite clean and minimal, so as to appeal to a yuppie sensibility. I think this has worked surprisingly well. The white type could have been too cold and clean but the usage of hand drawn type mediates this, making it ever so slightly imperfect in a very human way. The neat way that the information is tucked away mean that the first screen you see is very appealing without and clutter and the information in each page is accessible and useful. I have had a good look around at websites that do similar things and they just do not bring all of the resources into one place the way mine does, there is definitely a gap in the market.

The opacity of the squares framing the text is the only thing that was brought up in the final crit and I have experimented with increasing the opacity but just found that this felt too blocky and heavy on the page. Although at first glance it may interrupt the readability of the text, the light and airy effect of the reduced opacity is worth this slight compromise.

Overall I am happy with what I have managed to design. I have enjoyed the process of transferring my very tactile and illustrative style into a fully digital format and I think that it has worked really well. However, if there was one thing I would have changed, it would have been to do more coding and push what I could have made real. Of course this was predominantly because the tutor that specialises in coding was away on maternity leave but I do think that I should have made the effort to start coding sooner. Then again I also feel what made this design good is the way that it is not very aware of the limitations of coding and that these thoughts did not inter fear in the design process. So, it is both something i would and wouldn't change if I were to do tis brief again.

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 A Brief History Of... Mobile Site Mock Up

I also mocked up how the website would look when accessed through a mobile. The pop up information windows would stay up for approximately 5 seconds and then disappear so that there is enough time to read the information and tap any links to exterior sites.

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 A Brief History Of... Interaction With Exterior Gallery Giff

I have mocked up a simple giff to show how the gallery on pinterest would be accessed from the main website and then link back again, so that it can be entered from pinterest as well.

OUGD504 Studio Brief 03 A Brief History Of... Gallery on Pinterest

I have been thinking about how to layout the gallery pages with all the images I took of the walks for a while. Suddenly it occurred to me when I was on Pinterest; a link to a pinterest board. Previous crits have brought up the idea of some social media platform that allows people who have gone on the walk todd their own images and experiences. Up unit this point the only platform that seemed right for this was instagram, but because that is such a mobil phone platform i didn't want to encourage people to be on their phones while on the walk. That just goes against the whole idea of escaping that kind of city thing. So, pinterest seems like the perfect compromise. 

 I added a pinterest link button on the home page so that people can get to all the boards for each walk.

Each walk will have the logo as the cover image agains the image used in the background for that walk on the website.

As shown above each walk will be a separate board with the images in sequence for the walk.

The description of each image includes place reference of Norwich and the area of the walk length, so that they would appear when anyone searched any of these terms. The link to the relevant page of the website would also be in the description so as to not only use pinterest as a gallery but as a means of feeding people into the website. Also at the bottom of each image is a little salt of the earth logo, just so if the image get re used then they can always be tracked back to me.

By adding a specific place on pinterest it allows a map to pop up under the image and give people an idea of where this was taken along the walk.