Travel App
Infographic
Final Reflection
Brief note on my Travel App and Infographic:
My Travel App “GLOBAL GRUB” is an app for young adults like myself who like to travel and plan trips around trying new and delicious food. A lot of the functionality of the app, like finding places to eat in the location you are in or going to for example, you can get from apps like Trip Advisor. With that in mind, I put a lot of consideration into how I would make my app a unique and fun experience that people would pick over the more utilitarian and dare I say boring travel apps like Trip Advisor. I believe I have achieved that through my cute and playful icons, fun illustrations as well as my bright and happy colour palette. That and adding extra fun and useful features like a wheel to help you pick what to eat and the ability to curate and decorate a meal plan (referred to as menu in the app) for each day of your trip. I’m overall quite happy with what I’ve done but I must admit that my time management for this module wasn’t the best so the one regret I have is not doing more screens as I had a lot of ideas and rough sketches for more screens and features of my app that I just didn’t get around to developing further.
My infographic is all about screen time, why too much of it is bad and some ideas for how to spend downtime away from screens. I had a lot of ideas for content I wanted to include in my infographic but it was surprisingly difficult to source enough statistics for certain topics like gaming addiction in Ireland and how that causes a significant increase in screen time hours. That and not having the room or time to include them had me end up just leaving them out. I believe that the topics I did include like back pain, sleep and obesity can apply to anyone and everyone who has a screen unlike gaming addiction since it’s only really applicable to those who game, so that’s why I chose to include them. For downtime I used a bit common sense, did some research and considered what I like to do in my downtime that’s away from screens to make suggestions. Overall I believe I did a decent job. I think my colour and type choices work well and I’m really happy with how my illustrations turned out. My only regret is again not having the best time management. I ended up having to work on this assignment right just about up to deadline and so I didn’t have the chance to get a critique on my finished design. Due to this I’m sure my type hierarchy isn’t perfect but I put a lot of consideration into it and did my best.
What did I learn from this module?
This module taught me a lot about the process of illustration and visually communicating information/data. At first the idea of creating a set of icons, using illustrator figma to make illustrations, designing an app interface and creating a whole infographic was really intimidating to me. Although, after learning more and more about illustration and data visualisation each week and doing all the master/ apprentice tasks I felt perfectly prepared to take on the these tasks.
The lecture that I feel has impacted me the most was week 4’s on Illustrating Interfaces. We looked at the implementation of illustration in Ui and what really struck with me were the tips given on sketching interfaces. Now I’m almost always using a sharpie to sketch my ideas and I think that it has definitely helped make my ideas more clear and comprehensible. It also makes me draw things bigger which allows me to fit in more detail in my planning. I’m going to keep continuing using sharpie for my sketches going forward.
Overall I really enjoyed this module and I believe that it has instilled in me a love for digital illustration so much so that I think I may potentially want to lean more in that direction career wise. I’ve made the decision to try and continue doing little illustrative projects through the summer. I also really enjoyed exploring Ui and data visualisation.