Studio Brief - How To...

Now that we all completed the research aspect of the project, we brought it together and started to think about how we could help people maintain a healthier lifestyle. After much consideration and discussion as a group, we decided the best way to express all of our research to our target audience, being mainly teenagers to young adults, was through an App; an App being the most appropriate platform to display our information.

Initial Ideas and rest of the groups work:

 

 

My Work:  

I started to produce small and basic icons for each of the different sections: Sleep Routines, Drugs and Alcohol, Balanced Diet and Fitness and Exercise. To do so, I chose an iconic image that universally and instantly represented that certain element of healthy lifestyle. I then created a fairly simple vector image of the chosen icon, keeping in mind that when displayed through the App it would be fairly small. I also went about creating an App logo that would be seen from the main screen of the user's phone etc. This had to be simple, bold and suitable to be displayed small.

I decided to use a hand holding a heart as this represented the user taking their health, represented by the heart, into their own hands. I felt that this, as well as being simple and effective, was a clever interpretation of the task we had in front of us. I created some quick variations of the designs which we reviewed as a group before choosing the design that we felt was most aesthetically pleasing and appropriate.

 

Various Icons and Variations:

 

I then decided that in order to successfully represent all of the information we as a group had gathered about our various elements of a healthy lifestyle, we would need an effective and visually interesting way of representing different facts and statistics. Using the imagery I had already generated as a basis for this, I went about exploring how we could display statistics that kept strong visual links with its aspect of the healthy lifestyle.

 

Now we had all of the elements of the App, we needed a name. After having a session with the group in which we were throwing out name ideas and generating words that link to our project we decided on a name that Abbie put forward. Healthful; it is a clever play on the words healthy and helpful. We all felt that this has a ring to it and is short and catchy, similar to the vast majority of current App names.

 

I also looked at how the App would be displayed within the App store as this would be the first encounter the viewer would have with the actual App. I put together this lay-out and wrote a brief description of the App and what it does.

We then started putting our imagery and information together into context, looking at how it would work on a smaller screen. We chose a darker colour for the background to make sure that the text was easily readable and legible when made smaller for smart phones etc. We kept the icons fairly small so that the importance of the text wasn't effected but the category that you had chosen was still obvious.

Test 1:

 

Test 2:

We decided that test 2 was more visually pleasing and decided to try this with the rest of the categories and including some of our actual information as well.

 

I then did similar tests using the info-graphic style designs. As these were only tests, I just used dummy text so that I could see how the overall lay-out would work.

 

Realising that we needed a menu page,  I simply used imagery we already had to put together a page that allowed the user to choose a certain category. By using the all the icons, as well as the fingers from the hand, I created this page that simply and effectively gave the user full control over what information they would be receiving.

 

Now that we had all of the components needed, Tristan simply slotted the designs into these templates so that we could see how it would work as a whole project; showing the loading page, menu screen and an example of each category.