Archive for ‘Project 5: Info Graphics for Life, App’

This project was the most challenging conceptually and for functionality because we really worked hard as a group coming up with what exactly the app was supposed to be. It was a good learning experience to take an idea that was not necessarily or entirely your own and collaborate to come up with the final solution. It was very exhausting  to think you had a solution and then end up having to completely change it again because someone brought up a different viewpoint. This to me feels like what it will  be like working for a real design company, where you have a client with a need or idea, and you have to work together to come up with the solution, where in classes we generally get to make up whatever we want, with only basic guidelines.This made the project more of a struggle because it was not initially a concept that I was excited to do or really had a vision to do, but after exhaustively talking about all the options and directions it made me re-evaluate what I had originally thought of doing, and ended up with a better end product.

Doing the last app I deffinitley learned how to design for the iphone and on this one I broke away from the traditional iphone look and feel just a little bit to make it more playful and fun. I think that this app could have gone so in depth that I tried really hard to scale it back so that it was not too heavy on the mechanics of the app, for instance only having 4 menu options total, and very limited setting options. It just does one thing basically and that makes it where the graphs can speak for themselves and be much more interesting, and let the app interface just guide you through the process.

The biggest challenge for this project was tackling the infographics themselves. I realized before I could design the app, you really had to come up with the graphs and make them  really well, and then from there use the look and feel to work through how you actually use the graphs in the app. This project turned out better than I thought it would and I am pretty happy with the end result.

I don’t think I had too many problems with technical weaknesses since we have been working on details and gotten used to photoshop throughout the semester. If I did have a technical mistake it would probably be minor with the placement of the screen on the iPhone.

I don’t know if I had any conceptual mistakes with this project. I feel like I tried to get as many details of usage into this project. I tried thinking about how small the screen actually is and how a person would use this app on a real phone. Some of the designs I started in my wireframes were too small for a person to touch on their phone, so I decided to make some of the buttons on the screen bigger in my final so that it would work properly.

As I have been improving my skills in Photoshop, I feel like there’s not a whole need for improvement. Of course in every project there’s a little room for improvement because a design is not always perfect but I’m not sure what that may be. Possibly improving on color schemes or something like that would be efficient.

I definitely see improvement since the beginning of this class. At first I didn’t know how to layout a website or know how to design an interactive piece that would look good. But now after taking this class I have learned a lot and feel like my skills of designing an interactive piece has improved, especially in app design.

There is always room to improve like I said before. I think some of the things I need to improve are just minor details and I do want to make an interactive piece that looks professional. I feel like a lot of my work as a designer focuses more on illustration since that is my strength, but I want some of my designs to look more professionally done.

Overall, I enjoyed this class and projects that we have done. I think I enjoyed creating apps more than I did creating website pages. I think with a smaller space it is easier to design. I talked to the ACU Athletics department and told them I would like to make my ACU Athletics app a reality. However I am graduating on Saturday and leaving Abilene so I don’t know how I can get this up and running. I know I can talk to a professor in the business department that could possibly program it for me but I need to get it approved from ACU. Hopefully this will become a reality.

Upon reflecting on this final project I realized something. Technically I have become much more comfortable at designing for the screen. My Technical abilities have gotten much better, I am able to make the elements of my design more visually sound and cohesive. I find myself asking fewer questions about how to accomplish something and more about what to accomplish, I am very pleased with my increased technical proficiency. Conceptually this project was different from the last because we planned the concept up through wireframes together as a group, so conceptually this was much better. I think that way of exploring ideas as a group has really helped on this project. Although we had less time to actually design the app it went much smoother than before, I knew what I was doing and I knew how to get there.

My process has improved in its depth of research, and this is true of both the visual appeal and user interface. One thing I realized about building apps is that there is so much great stuff out there and so many different ways of treating the user interface, extensive research really helped me learn how to take what others learned, adapt it and apply it to my work. Although there are certain conventions associated with app building I feel like this is an area of design where boundaries can be pushed, which I hope in the future I can do. I feel like my app is functional and the interface works but it is somewhat conventional in the app world, I hope to find different ways of thinking out side the box in the future.

Ultimately this has been a very good experience for me. From the first assignment in the class to this last one, I see significant improvement. I know feel much more comfortable knowing that If i were to be asked to design a website or an iphone app that I would be successful. Also I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of interactive design and cant wait to dive in further while employing my skills in the future.

The one thing I loved about this project was meeting in the learning studio, and brainstorming as a group. That was the closest I’ve ever felt to being in a professional graphic design environment. Another thing I liked about this project was the subject matter of the smart phone app we created. This hypothetical personalized infographic app was a lot of fun to design, and after brainstorming and writing about it for a couple weeks I began to get pumped. This project however was not all sunshine and roses for me however, I couldn’t find an iPhone template that I liked, so I wasted a lot of unnecessary time in Illustrator creating as realistic of an iPhone as I could. Another difficulty I had, and I still don’t know the cause of this was, my photoshopped final versions came out super pixelated and very small… I designed them in Illustrator first on a 4″x7″ canvas, like I have every other project so far, and then moved individual pieces into photoshop, but  they kept turning out incredibly pixelated, and are almost half the size as the Illustrator files. Aside from that, I definitely enjoyed this project, and the creative process behind it.