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— Case studies
Irish Travel App
Designed with user accessibility and transparency in mind, this exclusive travel app has been initiated, planned and curated to achieve a perfect immersive and enhancing experience while traveling through the Island of Ireland providing navigational ease and attractive UI. This travel application is great for exploring the Island of Ireland in both the digital and real world.
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Malaria Infographics
An infographic about Malaria which prescribes the horrors of the deadly parasitic organism. Through thorough research, linear visual structure and stunning ways of displaying data this infographic shows the risk and creates awareness to help battle Malaria.
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Personal Brand
In this re-brand I have put emphasis on my core values to create a digital platform and identity that reflects my personality. Designed to be simplistic and modern yet still holds a sense of premium. This case study takes you step by step in the decision-making process of designing my personal brand.
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Case Study 1 – Irish Travel App
Eire Travels
Research, Development and Mock-up of a Travel app.
01. Overview
02. Concept Initiation
03. Research & Discovery
04. Planning & Wireframing
05. Iconography & Type
06. Feedback & Refinement
07. Conclusion
01
The Objective
During my second semester in Interaction Design at Ulster University, I was challenged to create a mock-up travel app with six pages, illustrations and an icon set. My intention was to create a fun, interactive, user-friendly and modern Irish travel app that reflected the Island as a whole through the representation of colour, typography and artistic style whilst showing my progress and decision making.
The Challange
In today’s market, there are plenty of travel apps that specialize in everything from trains to trams, although many bigger traveling apps focus on the global or continental market very few specialize in individual countries/islands this means I will have to look beyond the inspiration of similar local apps and look at both external and internal factors to gain inspiration and research to represent and develop my app as authentic as possible.
02
Firstly, I decided to create a sophisticated mind map in Miro to path out all the possible
characteristics/features my travel app can include. This creates a starter guide for me to help configure and manage my app going forward and ultimately help me prepare for concept initiation.
I wanted my app to be different, therefore I started looking at specific locations/countries for my travel app to be based in. This was an attempt to imagine the artistic direction and idea generation through environmental and cultural means. I then created made a Pinterest board and applied different pictures/illustrations that are symbolic to that particular country. For example, a Russian travel app can be imagined as rustic, serious and metallic whereas an Irish travel app would be saturated, joyful and imagined as vast rolling hills.
I began my colour research into looking at how other companies that are specific or valued to ones area embrace colours that are symbolic to them. I took into account political, national identity, environmental and cultural factors that these airlines/travel apps embrace. E.g. British airways use red, white and blue which is symbolic to their British national Identity.
I then began to experiment through trial and error on the colours that I want my app to have such as showing how they react with other colours while taking into account the external and internal light factors e.g. sun/screen brightness.
I decided to choose turquoise (#4CBFA2) which had enough green to embrace Ireland’s national colour creating a sense of friendliness and charm whilst retaining that ‘safety blue’ that most airliners/bookmakers contain on their sites.
03
I researched many local and global travel apps to gain inspiration and ideas such as the more broad and generic apps like Booking.com to the more unique and quirky apps such as Waze. I then analysed the content on the app noting things I liked and disliked based on the structure, artistic style, colour, typography, functionality, accessibility and more.
After researching many different digital graphic designers I was captivated by a particular game developer and digital artist named Harry Nesbitt, more exclusively his Alto’s Adventures game series. His use of geometric shapes, gradients and colours create a modern and timeless illustration with an intense atmosphere exactly what I want to reflect Ireland as.
04
I sketched a few basic wireframes to layout the fundamental structure of my travel app in order to put pieces together and create a sense of structure among my project. I also sketched many designs beside the wireframes to develop and initialize a visual concept of my app allowing me to visually capture of all my intended ideas on a few pages. It also allowed me to start planning the visual direction I want my app to captivate. This method proved to be effective, fast and easy in further developing my project.
Once I had all my ideas and a solid vision of my app, I created advanced digital wireframes which presented the architecture of my travel app clearly allowing me to maintain consistency in both form and function throughout my app. It also helped me develop navigational roles for each button clearly and decisively.
05
I researched and gathered large amounts of Icons from different designers on Pinterest that I think matched my intended artistic style. I also did some tasks to create as many variations of the same icon as I could as possible. These processes were both very inspiring and mentally innovative as it allowed me to create new and unique variations. These experiments allowed me to capture my artistic style and create consistency through my icons.
Through the inspiration of Vic Bell and her icon set, I developed a few versions of my own icons starting with sketching. I quickly went digital to see how they would look on my template mock-up to ensure it is visible to the user. After a few variations, I was extremely happy with the results of the icon set. I then furthered making sure every icon was measured to perfection, proportionate and consistent.
Like every visual factor when deciding what characteristic and typeface category I wanted my typography to consist of I needed to make it was matching my overall artistic style of the app. For this I thought a rounded sans typeface would be perfect. I decided to gather many similar rounded sans fonts and pick off till I found a perfect match. The winner was ‘All Round Gothic Demi’ which was prominent from the start as the droopiness and playfulness of the font matched the artistic style of my app whilst conveying a modern and semi-formulated structure that makes it easy to read.
06
Gaining feedback was a crucial stage for me in refining my app. These feedback sessions would offer both positive and negative assessments allowing me to strengthen my strong points and develop my weak points. Overall, I have come a long way from my initial design (left) through the help of these feedback sessions and also my own self-assessments. It also made me more aware of my own design through studying how people react while visually navigating the app.
07
This project was a personal favourite of mine to work on. I feel like I have come a long way from initial concept to finished product presenting my initial ideas and forming them into something bigger yet staying to terms on my original goal.
I am extremely pleased at how the app has turned out by creating consistency in the structure, illustrations, colour, iconography and typography to make a fun, engaging and harmonious travel app.
Doing this project has evolved me more into the world of UX/UI design giving me new methods of research and developmental strategies whilst allowing me to work on the graphic design side that gives me new ideas, methods and concepts of developing graphic art/illustrations that stand out.
This project also focussed on communicating to classmates and teachers through formative feedback and critique session. Not only has this project shown me all this but it has also built confidence in what I can do and what my potential is to build something bigger and better.
Looking back at the project now I acknowledge some of my mistakes with mainly sizing issues and slight visibility problems on some aspects of my design. Doing these self-critiques a slight interval after completing the product shows me how I can improve for the future.
Case Study 2 – Malaria Infographics
Malaria Infographics
Research, Development and Production of a Infographics.
01. Overview
02. Concept Initiation
03. Research & Discovery
04. Planning & Wireframing
05. Feedback & Refinement
06. Conclusion
01
The Objective
During my second semester in Interaction Design at Ulster University, I was challenged to create an infographics through various independent research, illustrations and data visualisation. My intention was to create a gritty, horrific and factual piece about the reality of Malaria to spread awareness and show the seriousness that this disease has.
The Challenge
There are plenty of infographics out there in every category, from facts about ducks swimming in a pond to information about a tin of beans. I want to create a infographic that is both compelling and unique from other similar infographics by showing striking, innovative and easy to read data as the seriousness of the topic must be ensured.
02
Firstly, to ensure I covered as many interesting topics as I could think of for serious infographics, I decided to create a mind map. This allowed me to explore the different ways I can surround the nature of my infographics in. I decided to highlight the most deadly ones e.g. Malaria.
Once I came to the conclusion that Malaria is my chosen topic I decided to progress another mind map by mapping all the stuff I can talk about on my chosen topic. This created a guideline to structure my work around making it easier for when the researching and designing stage came about.
I created a Pinterest board to begin the ideation and inspiration stage. As I looked through many infographics I noticed that the more sinister and serious infographics have darker tones and vice versa (See above). This puts emphasis on the psychological use of colour coloration between topics. Besides the illustrations itself, colour is one of the most important factors in creating a striking infographic, it allows people to unconsciously capture relative information as well as set the tone for an infographic.
03
The above shows a well-researched and articulated essay in which it displays the raw data, facts and risks involved with Malaria. By using the previously shown malaria mind map it has guided me to create an essay involving around the relevant and important topics I will include in my infographics.
Other than the use of colours, creating striking infographics must be unique and innovative, therefore the use of data visualization to create easy-to-read facts or stunning art showcases must be considered. I decided to research many data visualist to find many unique and creative ways of displaying data from artificial intelligence to basic geometric shapes.
As my Infographic topic devolved onto the African continent I wanted to mimic the map of Africa to display data in a unique way and simplistic way. I played around with many ideas and researched many concepts before coming to the conclusion of using simple geometric shapes combined with colour coding to create a stunning yet striking showcase piece for my work.
04
I decided to create large illustrations in a simple yet creative way to show the horrors and devastation of malaria. Simple data visualizations such as pie chart converted into an earth creates a more creative and impacting approach to displaying the facts. I also included many iconographic illustrations of death as well as keeping the structure formal and easy to follow.
05
Feedback from teachers and classmates throughout my project was helpful as it allowed me to see how others engaged and interpreted the facts that were being displayed. This gave me the chance to monitor their experience and define faults that were presented during the critique thus allowing me to change things such as the sizing or readability of sections.
06