IXD104 : Finishing My Travel App

City Illustration

In my last travel app post I began considering the illustration part of my app. I tried drawing some Brussels monuments and came up with the idea of having them sit on a line together.

 

These sketches were very simple, just to get an idea of how to draw them simply put still have them recognisable. Before developing them digitally n a more illustrative way, I took to my illustrations inspiration Pinterest board which you can find here. I’ve been steadily adding to it over the course of this semester and I think it really helps me pinpoint the style of illustration I want to be doing.

After that I went to illustrator and started doing the outlines. The approach I took to this is a bit similar to how I did my 9 iterations but this time I didn’t trace over I just referred back to images of the monuments a lot.

I decided to leave applying colour until I had them positioned on the app screen. Once I put them all on a line together and moved them to my last app screen, I added in my colours. I only used the colours present in my app and I think something really cool came out of doing that.

 

Last Screen

In my last travel app post I also showed a wireframe of what I wanted to do for my last screen. This would be a Recommended in a specific location (being Brussels) page that is part for the food/restaurant discovery section of the app. You get there through the plate icon in the centre which takes you to a menu of your locations and then by clicking one you would get taken to another menu which includes a recommended button that takes you to this page. Had I had time I would have liked to flesh out these screen ideas but here are some wireframes.

Once I had a plan for my last screen, I went and digitised it. Here’s it with my other screens

For the restaurants used some places I went (or at least attempted to visit) to when I was last in Brussels to visit my sister who was working there at the time. My sister is vegan and so when I go out to eat with her, more often than not we got to a vegan place or at least somewhere that has vegan options. We tried to go to Liu Lin but one evening but it was too busy so we had to go somewhere else. My sister had gone to them before and was raving about them to me though so I decided to include them here. My rational for these recommendations was that the person using this app is like me or my sister and enjoys East Asian food but is also vegan like my sister. It kinda ties in to my idea of having to answer a questionnaire when you start up the app. I didn’t get a chance to flesh out that screen design but hopefully you can sort of see how the app would utilise that. In this screen I have the narrator of the app ‘Earthing’ who you can see on the launch screen, give a quick little explanation of why they’ve picked out these places for you, which would be based on your questionnaire answers.

After receiving some feed back on my final screens I went and made some of the body copy darker so that it would be easier to see. Mainly the text in the buttons on the home page and the text that’s really small on the recommendation buttons.

 

My Travel App

Here is a pdf of my final travel app screens: finished-screens

I’m really happy with how its turned out. The whole time I was developing this app design I kept considering how I would make it stand out from more utilitarian apps like Trip Advisor, so that people would gravitate towards this app for the utility but also the playful novelty experience of it more than anything. I believe I have achieved this by making my app as cute, fun and playful as I could without taking away from the functionality of it. My one regret is not digitising more screens so that I could showcase some more features and just generally show more of how I planned for the app to work but I just didn’t have enough time left. I’m particularly pleased with how my icons and illustrations turned out and I think that this assignment has helped me realise how much I enjoy doing digital illustrations.

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