Interface Design - Field Research

We started Interface Design project, and today we had to go out and do some research in the area. We took pictures of kiosks for: mobile phone credit, Supervalue self-checkout, AnPost, Dart and car park ticket. 

Information Design - Symbols

I enjoyed designing the symbols, though I had a bit of a hard time with some. It's hard to believe but I had a  hard time drawing the fish! It's the middle of the night and I'm very sleepy. I did the first half when we were first given the design brief in Februaray, and now I realized that the second half hasn't been done, so here I am designing the rest of the symbols. The fish looks very funny, but as much as I tried to fix it, I kept dozing off and I messed it up more with my drawing tablet, making it look funnier. So I thought to leave it as it is because I have to submit my blog now and maybe one day come back to it and fix it.

Draft of the symbols design.

Information Design - Map

That would be the project that I least enjoyed. It's not easy to draw maps and I don't think I'll be doing it again. 

My draft of the map design.

Information Design - Instructional

This brief was exciting to do. I love Illustrator and enjoy working with it. That's what I used to draw both instructional designs. The egg instructions was easy to draw, but the tie one wasn't. I don't even know how to tie a tie. I tried tying my kids' school ties but was never successful so I got them an elastic tie. But now since I have to draw the instructions, I had to find out and learn how to tie a tie. Finally, now I know how and I was able to draw it (but I had to look at other pictures, couldn't draw it from my mind). Filling it with color was tricky because I had open paths, so I had to go over the open paths and join whatever can be joined and redraw those that can't. If anyone is wondering about the tie color, I was trying out gradients and I actually liked how this gradient looked on the tie :)

This is my draft. I started with the chopsticks and wrote all the instructions. But when I tried to draw the hands in Illustrator, it wasn't easy, it took me a long time to draw one hand, so I just switched to the tying a tie info.

Advertising & Campaigns: Olympics Poster

We had to do a London Olympics Poster and after a few ideas and a few posters, I finally decided that this is the one.
I used Illustrator to do this poster. For the word London, I used a clipping mask to show a picture of London attractions through the word.
Drawing the torch took a bit of time, especially when trying to find the right gradient.
As for the running silhouettes, I added these at the end when I saw that something is missing from the poster, so I drew the running silhouettes and put the opacity down to 25%.

Advertising & Campaigns: Postcards

postcard 1

postcard 2

postcard 3

back of postcards

In here we had to design 3 postcards against binge drinking. So I chose to use math for all 3 as in numbers, symbols, equations, scale... I thought what's the best way to put through a message? Using words is best. Sometimes pictures and images don't send the right message, or people misunderstand them, so you need to add words to make your message clear. I chose to write the message using the font Ravie, so it catches people's attention. To make a note, I'm against drinking alcohol, if it was up to me I would design posters to stop drinking not just binge drinking.

Summary of term 1

It was a tough semester with a lot to do every week with some challenging projects and live projects, but I enjoyed designing them all and I learned alot! I especially enjoyed doing the 3 live projects: iPhone Cover design, Spar Reusable Bag design and the All-Ireland Scholarships poster design. Winning one of them made it very interesting and boosted up my confidence in my work. I'm hoping it won't be the only project I'm successful in.