Greg Pidgeon
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Design Exercise (Week 6)
Designer/Creative Director
In this exercise we were put into pairs, Dave & me being a group. Each being the designer for their own project and the creative director for the other persons. The aim of the exercise was to create icons and a visual identity for our toys.
My idea for the icons and navigation was to set it out much like the standard desktop navigation on a Mac.
i.e
The directional joystick of the Navman handheld device would be used to scroll a toolbar of icons that enlarged as the user rolled over them. The icons would include things such as health, strength, tolls, cash etc and would be represented graphically.
I pitched this idea to Dave and he gave me some feedback before I went any further. The points are as follows....
1. The icons would need to be vector graphics in order to scale whilst scrolling.
2. Detail of graphics is key to making them appealing as the primary user interface (e.g streath icon could be a weight bar but would need to be shaded to add to realism perhaps)
3. Keep in mind target age group. Icons could be a catooney style as the product is aimed at a younger age group.
After taking into account the above ceative direction a mocked a couple of icons (in about 2 mins cos I ran clean out of time).
Dave concentated on one icon for the main menu of his digital toy. The design is below.
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As his creative director I liked the design so I asked where it was going to be located. He showed me and the size it would be. I suggested that as it was such a detailed icon it might get confused if it was only going to be small. So dave took out the back ground writting to give it more impact at such a small size. So it would look like this...
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A constructive session I thought, also making me think about the navigation graphics a little more which is good and its always nice to have an outside view on your work. Helps you to think about things you wouldn't normally have thought about.
:: posted by Greg Pidgeon, 2:03 am
