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WHO'S THAT GOOD BOY?
The educational app for all ages, encouraging users to travel and discover the many varieties of doggos we have in this beautiful world even right on our own doorstep.
Who’s That Good Boy? allows users to have a fun, interactive experience as well as sharing the experience with family or friends.
To read further notes and my reflections on this brief, click the link below to my Tumblr page!
The Challenge
Create an illustrative travel app considering elements such as mobile design principles, colour and thumb.
The PROCESS
For this project, I began by exploring the potential answers to the problem given by drawing a mind-map of ideas after hearing the topic “Travel”. From this, I was able to branch the ideas out further to see which ideas held the most potential in regards to fulfilling the set brief of creating an app using illustration but also considering the potential needs of the intended users.
After discussing my list of ideas in class, my next stage was to begin market research. I had to gain a sound knowledge and understanding of all the elements that need to be considered when building and designing an app before I could begin developing my own concept. Looking at how existing apps use illustration in regards to travel as well as their navigation layout approach, icon sets and branding were all helpful as it made me consider what was needed for my own app in order for it to be successful.
As I’d never created an icon set before, I used the design technique of master apprenticing to recreate a set of travel icons so that I would have a better approach to designing using just simple shapes. I enjoyed completing this exercise and it encouraged me to research the history of icons to see how they have varied in design approach from the 1900’s to present day.
Now that I had a better knowledge on what needed to be included in an app, I then went back to my initial mind-map of ideas. From this I decided to create a dog themed app as I felt it held strong visual stimulation for creating illustrations. My inspiration behind the functioning of the app stemmed from looking at Pokemon Go. I wanted to design an app that encourages the user to travel in real life to collect as many dog breeds as they could, gaining a stamp for each breed as a reward.
The idea for the app is that the user would photograph a dog they find whilst out exploring, the app would then transform the dog into an illustrative id card which would then be stored. Each dog discovered gains the user more ranking and also unlocks mini challenges like a treasure hunt as they have to answer questions and follow clues to end up at a final destination.
Turning to my sketchbook was the next stage of my process so that I could start developing visuals for my app design. I created many rough sketches in regards to icons, illustrations and wireframes so that I could move on to digitising the app using Sketch to develop them into clean, finished design elements which would piece together to finalise the overall app design.
I produced a high-level mock-up of my app to present in front of my classmates in order to receive constructive feedback that would then help guide me to a finalised app design. Once I made the recommended changes to my designs, I created a functioning prototype using InVision to best show how my app design answers the problem set in the original brief.
Some Obstacles
The main challenge I encountered was when I was digitising the dog illustrations as at this point I had limited experiences using Sketch for these purposes. The illustrations therefore took quite a bit of time to create however I feel that this experience helped strengthen my skill set in regards to using this software.
My Reflection
Throughout the process of this project, I feel like I was able to strengthen my existing skill set for developing and designing concepts from start to finish, however, I also got to experiment and learn some new techniques I hadn't tried out before such as prototyping and considering the rule of thumb.