Communication is a Virus: Initial Ideas

We first started off branching from 5 a day and we eventually felt like we were getting too stuck around the whole concept of 5-a-day been from the origins of it been the fruit and vegetable guideline set by the government. 

Mostly due to how much it was marketed, first introduced into the UK (USA and Germany!) in 2002, after 10 years it's very much ingrained into our culture. Even if no one does follow it. 

We decided to make something that would be relevant to most people, as trying to stay healthy with fruit is a more than overdone topic. The idea we came up with was to take the 5 a day approach towards Social Networking as more than most people use it.

We identified all the different possible social networks that we could use to research into and all the different activities you can do on each. The 3 big contenders been Facebook, Twitter, tumblr.

We decided to tally how many times we visited our favourite social networks  for one day and I came off with:

Facebook: 34

Reddit: 32

The results were similar throughout the rest of the group:

Joe:

Facebook: 36 

Twitter: 22 

Instagram: 14 

Buzzfeed: 2

Anna:

Facebook: 24

Emily:

Facebook: 30

Grace:

Facebook: 25
Twitter: 10
Reddit: 1

We're all addicted.

We then looked at the different sides to social networking sites to discover any problems we could solve or figure a way around to solve. There seemed to be equally good as much as there is bad between them. However there was significantly more bad/negative aspects to Facebook than Good. Which kinda says alot about it. 

We came back together to create another spider diagram to brainstorm ideas, focusing still social networking and 5-a day. We came to the conclusion of using Social networks 5 times less a day. 

We thought a good way to show this was through a possible app, so me and Joe both created this mock-up of how it would perhaps wrok which were then later developed by Emily for the Crit

I've not really looked into how different elements of an app/website work and since our idea is to create a app/website to display information on a person's addiction of Facebook (currently, twitter is our next idea to develop onto if it works out) These images are research and inspiration  for how different UI can be designed within the app, examples I think work really well or show something different.

 

  

 

 

Source: Dribble.

OUGD406: Indesign

For one of the Design principles sessions we were tasked with creating mock-up spreads, I used this to experiment with layout and give me inspiration for this task

From that I then created a design sheet centered around the Aardvark, I came up with the title of A for Aardvark for the spread, I wanted to make it rather laid back and not to serious or in-depth. Something that would perhaps interest anyone. I really enjoyed experimenting with my thumbnails and I think I came up with some good solutions having not really done a double page spread on this scale before!.

It took me some getting used to indesign as I was relatively new to it and Phil's crash course in it was really useful, I used the rectangle and using the arrow keys to create grids the best solution and fastest for setting up a document.

I also discovered how to round corners!

I'm a bit better with indesign now, I find it relatively quick to work around in especially over photoshop and illustrator when it comes to doing type work, makes sense because that's what it's for.

I wanted the image on the spread to blend into the background, I found with the previous ones I used that they were just awkward to work with and I thought by doing this I could be more experimental? I really liked on the picture how the aardvark was illustrated.

I found justification worked the best, I don't know if was just how it looked, but I feel like im cheating when I do use justification, I found a way online to remove the huge gaps that it leaves behind however to make it look a lot more natural 

On the bottom of the images I added a green bar, I didn't like how they faded on the bottoms and I thought it was perhaps guide you better due to it been solid green. It finished it off rather well.

I drew out the words A for Aardvark and then live traced them quickly to then put it in as the title, I thought this worked really well along side the illustrations, It's kinda of rough and sketchy but It fit in with the look I was aiming for and I think i did rather well at achieving that.