In an effort to maintain my blogging I’ve decided to share with you one or two things that I’ve been learning in Illustrator. I’ve always preferred Photoshop because I like to draw and thought that Photoshop was the best medium for enhancing my sketches but, I have now had my eyes opened to the wonder that is Illustrator (a bit late, I know..).
The first thing I wanted to do was make a stamp. I had recently received a magazine for Office Shoes in the post and liked the look of the sales stamps they had used. I found a few nice and simple tutorials online that teach you the basics of how to curve your text and created repeating circles. The results are as follows:
I will also post the videos that helped me out:
After I played with that I decided to have a go at the pen and shape tool. I haven’t got any good examples of what I have managed to do with it, but I tried some online tutorials in an effort to teach myself all the tricks.
I’m still learning but I’ve found that I already feel confident that I can do most things on it already, which is quite a nice feeling.
Here’s a paper crane I threw together when I was mucking about with shapes. If I do anything else that is particularly pretty or nice I’ll try to post it.
Although this is the first post on this site, I would love to start by talking about the most recent project that I’ve been working on. I’ve only just finished this so it’s still fresh in my mind, the perfect time to get it all down!
Myself and another 3 people we’re working on an app called “The Travel Bucket” an original idea that stemed from some research done on my grandmother and then further developed by myself and others.
The brief wanted us to design and prototype an app for a grand person, preferably something that challenges stereotypes about the elderly. It’s different designing for an older generation as you often find that some grand people haven’t used apps before and aren’t as interested in the internet or computers. Luckily my grandmother was quite keen to play around with The Travel Bucket and help us in any way possible.
I’m quite proud of the way this turned out and it has proven itself to be very usable and effective. The app was designed for the iPad and although it’s only completed to a functioning prototype, I was thrilled to see people picking it up and wanting to play with it during our studio presentations.
The app helps you to plan your holidays from A-B. You start of with your initial plans which might be something like, ‘I would love to go to New Zealand!‘ and fill up your list with all those places you dream about. You can see where those places are on a map and, also add them from the map. This will make a pin appear in the location and the place appear in your list. The idea of including a map came from my gran, who still uses a traditional atlas to browse the corners of the world. I like the idea of using this traditional way of looking at places, geography is vitally important in planning a holiday!
The other sections of the app include Share and Book, which complete the process by allowing you to start a conversation with friends and family members to chat about where you plan on going together. You could also share stories about your previous travels. When we thought about privacy and the social aspects of this app we originally wanted to make it less like a social network and more personal. However, after making the app and letting people interact with it we saw the potential it has to link in with Facebook and we have grown of the idea of sharing your list with others. Whether the app will continue to develop and if this will become a feature is still undecided but, it is now an option.
Book is probably the most self explanatory part of the app and the section that didn’t require as much thought. We decided to use the site ‘Skyscanner‘ to get our data. It was suggested that The Travel Bucket could perhaps be sponsored by them. You simply input details about the amount of people, where and when you want to go and Skyscanner would take over and lead you to companies with available flights.
The whole app was made in Xcode, which proved to be very easy to use after you get your head around the way it works. It was also the perfect choice as it allowed us to produce a functioning prototype that we could show to others and from using it they could fully grasp the way the app works. I would love to talk a little bit more about my experience with Xcode and how we used it to implement our final prototype, but I think it’s probably best I share this with you in another post. The implications we had with the program (like trying to wrap our heads around the newer version when we were originally taught in the older version) could potentially cause me to rant for a while.
The overall idea is that The Travel Bucket would essentially allow you to have all your travel needs and information ‘from the comfort of your chair’ which is ideal for my grandmother and, also all other users who might want to use this app. The nice thing about this app is that it could have a large range of potential users, not just the elderly.
I enjoyed working on The Travel Bucket and designing the way in which it looks and feels. It started of as quite a simple Bucket List type application and since then has developed into a much broader planning app that can actually be fun to use.
The colours, fonts and graphics (though few) were designed in Photoshop originally, and then those files were imported into Xcode. It turns out this is a very easy and effective way of getting your designs to do something and its definitely something that I would visit again in future projects.
Below is the video that was put together (filmed by myself and team in my grans house) to illustrate how the app would work. It was not intended that this video would be an advertisement but, more like a description of it’s functions and uses.
