There came a point this week as I was working on my prototype that I grew really unhappy with the way it was looking. The colour scheme was cute at first but it was all a bit much and it did look quite right to me so I decided to re approach the style and colour of my app.
What I had Done
These are the colours I had picked and the onboarding screens I had designed…
As you can see I was going for a gradient situation but I dunno, gradients were super big a couple years ago but aren’t really on trend anymore and as much as I love gradients but if I’m designing for young adults, it’s gotta be trendy. Also I don’t know what it is but just generally it doesn’t look good and I don’t like it so I wanted to change it. As well as that, speaking frankly I didn’t put as much consideration into my choices here than I should have but I was in a rush to get ready for week 7’s critique.
Looking at Trends
When Reconsidering my approach to style and aesthetic, the first thing I did was find out what the design trends of 2022 are and then see what would be applicable to my design.
Here are some of the articles I looked at…
- https://venngage.com/blog/graphic-design-trends/
- https://piktochart.com/blog/graphic-design-trends/
- https://graphicmama.com/blog/graphic-design-trends-2022/
- https://www.vectornator.io/blog/graphic-design-trends
- https://99designs.co.uk/blog/trends/graphic-design-trends/
Colour Research
Here are some resources I looked at on colour in relation to design…
- Color Theory: Brief Guide For Designers
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All you need to know about colors in UI Design — theory & practice
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Accessibility Design 101 : Color Contrast Considerations for UX Designers – XD Ideas
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https://uxdesign.cc/design-system-accessibility-color-26834083a3a2
- How to Design a Great Medical App – Steel Kiwi
These were mostly refreshers of things I was already pretty aware of but that last one was really great as it gave me an amazing insight as to why different kinds of medical and health related apps have specific colourings to them. It was really interesting.
Rethinking Style and Colour
I have a mood board for this project that I’ve been steady adding different things to like iconography, illustration, colour inspiration etc. that help give shape to this aesthetic I have in my mind for the app. You can view that here.
For my app I want it to have a trendy appearance but more importantly I want it to be uplifting, optimistic and encouraging as well as being fun and engaging. So this time around my approach to colour was to keep it light and fresh with just fun pops of colour, not too overpowering or distracting.
For picking the colour this time I looked to a variety of different illustration pieces that matched the vibe I had in mind from my illustration Inspiration Pinterest board.
I swatched a bunch of colours and then narrowed them down to a cohesive rainbow palette…
So I had my colours, it was time to rethink that starting screen, because it sets the tone for the rest of the experience or at least that’s what I took from the peak-end rule.
I had the idea of like it being light and optimistic, but also a bit chaotic because the life of a typical student tends to be so. The app is not meant to make people feel ashamed of the chaos and losing control but to embrace it and try to work your way through it by looking after yourself as you deserve to be looked after. With that I thought a lot about scribbles and paint splotches and I sketched out an idea…
Ok so these sketches may not do the greatest job of expressing my true vision but you’ll see in a minute…
So now I had a good idea of what I was going for. I should probably preface by saying I’ve been sick quite a lot this semester so i’m a wee bit behind with everything and if this was a perfect world I would have had the time to hand render the perfect scribbley background for this project but alas I just didn’t. So instead I looked through the free vector backgrounds that adobe stock had to offer. I downloaded a bunch of one I thought could work and then narrowed them down until I found what I felt was the best choice.
I then recoloured it which actually ended up taking me probably twice as much time as it would’ve taken me to rustle up a background on photoshop but oh well, hindsight is 2020 and it did end up looking pretty cool.
