Rational and reflection

Rationale: Evie Deroles and Jennifer Craig

Tim and Fay.

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We targeted our design at uni students to try and involve a younger audience in creating a community around them. Our call to action revolved around a ‘zombie apocalypse’ emergency, with the idea that the neighbourhood is getting prepared for an emergency while also grabbing their attention and having fun with it. We made sure to keep our zombie theme light and tasteful and not too dystopian or scary. Our choice of font and colour reflects this light-hearted feel as does our illustration style. We chose the icon of the gnome to convey a sense of neighbourhood as well as giving the audience a humanoid figure to relate to.  Our zombie hand gives a sense of impending doom without showing too much and reducing the anticipation.  Over all our design is aimed to get people excited and interested in preparing for an emergency.

Evie Reflection

My favourite aspect was doing the final illustrations.

My biggest learning was that you have to be able to change your illustrations at the drop of a hat even if you've spent hours doing them, if they don't work then they don't work and you have to figure out something new to do.

One thing I would change would probably be the speed at which we did the poster. I would probably try to get it nailed down earlier as the other parts of the project did rely on us having a solid style.




Jennifer reflection

My favourite aspect was designing the website and learning how to design for a mobile device.

My biggest learning was A) not to get too attached to my designs. Things that I was proud of before won't necessarily work with the rest of the ever developing design. B) To never stop developing. There's always more you can do.

If I had more time I would develop the web design even further. Same with the poster. I feel like it's not really finished, but you gotta stop somewhere.


Website URLs:

Laptop:  https://invis.io/UB8ZM308S#/198038776_Web_Home_Test_1
Mobile:  https://invis.io/HE8YVM4R9#/197323962_Mob_Home

Final Poster/ Brochure/ Website

Final Poster


Final Brochure- Front and Back


Final Desktop URL

https://invis.io/UB8ZM308S#/198038776_Web_Home_Test_1 

Final Mobile URL

https://invis.io/HE8YVM4R9#/197323962_Mob_Home

Website mobile

This is all of the website mobile developments

Home Page

This was the first version of the homepage for mobile. Its already reasonably well resolved because its just based off the desktop version so all the same information was ready to go.

  These two are both the current home page, they just show two of the different previous events. You can click the buttons to see a different image from a previous event.

About

This is the about page, again pretty much fully resolved due to it just being altered slightly from the desktop website.

Get Prepared

This is the get prepared page, the blue arrows will open with more information when you click on them, as seen below.
  

Staying in Touch

This place is relatively similar to the previous page, once again the arrows open to show text.



Tim's feedback:

- Nav bar needs to be bigger
- Make sure text is relevant to our theme
- The black home page against the white of the other pages is a little jarring
- About page currently only shows the gnomes when you first click. Needs some indication that you can scroll down
- add the % sign to the text under the symbols on about page in case the image doesn't load
- Make sure the quote on the about page is within the grid


Our critique:

- Have underlines instead of overlines on Nav bar
- Make the font size smaller
- Make the leading bigger
- Needs a splash of colour on each page, try colouring some text in zombie hand colour

Johnny Critique:

Website

These are all of our website developments from over all of the weeks. This is what Jennifer was working on while I (Evie) was doing the brochure and finishing touches on the poster from the other posts. We did of course collaborate on everything, Jennifer would give critiques on the poster or make a few adjustments herself and she would show me updates on the website for me to give opinions on.
Some inspritation:
 



Desktop Website 
Home page
 This was our first look at the website digitally, it need a lot more information on it, but its just getting the general idea across of our layout.

This is the second development of the home page, it has all of the mandatory text we want on it, with the rest of it being on other pages. We thought it was best that the home page wasn't to text heavy.
This development has all of the text and images we want to include. It has a bit more text than the previous one but it is our own text rather than the mandatory stuff, just a few paragraphs warning about zombies. We have also included a space for previous events as we thought that would be good for getting people excited about planning their own events after.
This version has a slight change to the layout of the next event space.


About Page

This was the first version of the about page. One problem with it is that when its shown on the computer the gnomes faces are cut in half which is a bit of a distraction when people first go onto the page.

 This is another version of the about page, it has all the same information but the gnome is moved up so that his face doesn't get cut. The words over the gnomes body isn't quite as legible as we would like, and the black text over the dark purple hat also doesn't stand out enough.
This one is quite a different layout, the gnomes as moved to the bottom which is quite an interesting way to do it, he's like a little surprise you get to see if you actually look at the whole page. The text layout is also very different. The pulled out quote looks a bit floaty as it doesn't really line up with anything but it is a good thing to think about for future layouts.

This one has quite a good body text layout, although the pull out quote is still a bit floaty. The text over the hat has been resolved as well, while managing to keep the gnome at the top to draw people into the page rather than just having all text.

 This is our current about page, the leading on the text has been made bigger so the text is much easier to read, and the gnomes are now smiling to make it seem like a happier page, we don't want to scare people away from reading by having scared gnomes. The gnomes also are still high enough up to not get cut off at all.

Get Prepared

 Our first get prepared page was mostly just showing the information we wanted to have on it.

From there it became much more resolved, spaced over 4 columns with the biggest amount of text is taking up two, it means that you aren't constantly flicking down to the line while also not being dragged along such a long line that you get all muddled up. Then there is other information along the right side that has been differentiated by having different coloured headings and also utilising the over line that we have used in previous pages, as well as the brochure and poster.

This was our first iteration of the staying in touch page. It works quite well in the three column except the the last bit which is just hovering by itself.


This was an attempt to rectify this, by moving one of them up so that the other 9 fit in the 3 columns. However this ends up making the top text look a little bit squished.

    

These three are all slightly different variations of the same layout, just switching things around a little bit each time. This last one is our current version of it. It works best with the space, without leaving big gaps and still being easy to read.

Week 6

Week 6 was more one on one critiques with Fay and Tim.

We just needed to make a few final touch ups with the brochure which included adding some bullet points to our lists, making sure all of our block colours matched up and all of our overlines were evenly spaced.


As for our poster we had a new idea for the background, which was having a solid colour but Fay said that then the gnome was just floating and it lost its neighbourhood link which was the house which wasn't good so we decided to then change the colour of the house in the background to orange so that it was a more eye catching poster while keeping its link to neighbourliness. 

Week 5- INTERIM

INTERIM PRESENTATION

Class 1 we started off with another interim. We began by getting into groups of 2-3 pairs to critique one anothers poster, flyers and websites. We had two versions of the poster to show, as well as the flyer with two different covers to see what was more liked. After that we went around to view the other classes work and had a one on one with Fay.
 
 
add checkist review

With the brochure we had a few conflicting critiques about its size. All of our peers that we talked to said that they liked how small it was as it was easy to put in their pocket and they were less likely to throw it out because of that, however Fay said it was to small and that we could double its size. At A4 when it was folded it ended up being A6 and if we bumped it up to A3 then when it was folded it would be A5 and just a bit bigger and easier for elderly people to read. We hadn't really thought of that as we were aiming towards uni students but we figured that in every neighbourhood there was bound to be a few older people.

With the poster everyone liked the first one better as the background wasn't as overwhelming. However during our critique with Fay, she asked us to make our illustration style more like old fashioned comic book style as our new ones are to similar to the ones we did before and she wanted us to expand our horizons more. Below are what we did to try to make it more comic booky without changing our illustration styles. We slanted the text at the top and in the second one added a filter to make it look slightly more grungy.

We then continued on refining and developing, Jennifer doing the website while I continued with the poster and brochure. We also ended up with a new illustration style that we could both do, Jennifer would do the base colour and outlines while I added in the shading and highlights afterwards.


Class 2
The second class this week is focused on us continuing on with everything, getting more critiques from Tim and Fay.
 This is our new illustration style, Fays critique of it was just to keep playing around with the body text as it isn't quite sitting right.

With the brochure now being bigger we were able to play around a bit more with the composition.
Brochure 1
 




Brochure 2
 




Brochure 3
 





Fays critique of these was that the first one was working best but that if we were going to have a big space at the top we needed to fill it with a visual/ block of colour.
We had the idea of making it look like the zombie skin but when we did it, it didn't really get that across to people who didn't already know it was zombie skin.

This is what we ended up with,