design practice: HOW IT ALL CAME TOGETHER

Once we were all on the same page about the decision to go ahead with designing a shopping booklet, website and app and had agreed on the style and theme we would be working on, it was easier to assign each other a sort of role within the group and what part of the project we would be responsible for.

In the end, I paid special attention to the group and project logo, sam handled layouts and iconography, where he brought together information from everyone, and Imogen's knowledge on the subject into a nice looking layout. He also designed the app and website. Luke also worked on layouts, size guides and helped Emma with bringing the layouts onto a net for the booklet. So everyone had quite an important role to play and I think in the end it all came together.

We presented the final work on Friday (9/12/11) and we got quite a positive review, the one thing which we could work on is targeting the audience better, I'll go more ind epth into this in a separate post. For now here is how it all came together from the initial stages to the end.

For Sam's blog click here
For Emma's click here
For Luke's click here
For Imogen's click here

Initially, when we got the brief we all had a discussion comparing each others initial how to's, the two that caught interest were How To Be A Best Man and How To Buy A Diamond Engagement Ring, in the end we chose the ring idea, for the reasons mentioned above. We felt an information or some kind of booklet or guide would be helpful to a certain group of people.

We researched it and found that diamonds account for 75% of diamond rings, a woman hardly ever proposes and when she does, the man buys the ring anyway. We looked at existing websites and all the information and found that there was literally tons. It was our job to convert this into bite size chunks for the ordinary person to take in and become informed on, ready to go shopping.

Initially, we weren't sure on how it would look or what the style would be so we all went away and experimented with imagery, above are some efforts by Luke, Emma and Sam. They were all quite nice but we didn't really know what to do with them.

Some design sheets by me and Sam. After drawing up alot of diamonds we found that a diamond on it's own is instantly recognisable and quite an interesting image anyway, the simple line work seemed to work well against white paper, as you can see in the top-right picture. We looked into existing colour palettes of websites, here We found that black on white was used quite alot but we wanted to add a twist to it.

At this point we knew we were making a booklet and that was it, it was designed to be able to pick up from a shop as a sort of helper guide letting you know what's what and prepare you for negotiating and asking the staff at a jewellers questions, so we played around with a hotdog fold booklet as you can see here, (above) we made quite a few knock ups.

I found myself thinking about the logo alot, so I started playing about with the logo and how it would look, I wanted it to look quite classic and retro but modern too, you can see who I was influenced by here and see the design process here

As it says, after the crit, and after advice from tutors we decided to really push the secretive side to buying a diamond engagement ring. We also realised we were kind of contradicting ourselves with trying to give an unbiased and bitesize view and at the same time, trying to get shops to endorse it. So we decided to base everything around a website. The website would offer links to ordering/downloading a shopping guide and also downloading an app. This way, it's all kind of on cyberspace and is a lot more secretive.

Here's some of the app development, the bottom right is Luke's sort of info graph, in our white on black style. Luke then sent his layouts to Sam, who fine tuned them a bit in preparation for the app and website. To see this closer click here and here

Luke also looked at the size guide alot too, which you can see here

Emma was working on the booklet design and made quite a cool diamond pattern here. I passed over my logo and group logo to everyone so they could implement it as and when needed so everything looked consistent. You can see more of her development here

Here is the website that Sam worked on, this is the splash page

Ability to order the app, it would link straight to iTunes or Android Market for said app.

Option of ordering shopping guide by mail, which as I said Emma had been working on.

Here's how it looks on the home screen of the phone. As it's meant to be secretive, it's simply called 'Diamonds' on the home screen.

Login screen, where you can login or order a unique code that only you know. Up to this point there's no mention of diamond engagement rings so somebody else wouldn't know, and your partner wouldn't know. Only after the password, that only you should know, does it all open up and become clear what it's about.

Here's the text you would get, giving you your username and password.

Here's the main menu showing all the main information we'd give. The website and app are designed to be the definitive, full information guide. The shopping guide is designed to be used AFTER reading up on the stuff and having some idea on the subject so it's less in depth.