Post 01: Design Research

When I was beginning the assignment, I started by researching the design choices of other apps of all types to see what type of style is more appealing to users while still being simple to navigate. A simplistic layout that was easy to navigate was my main goal over aesthetics as the app would be used at festivals and therefore the user would have many distractions and most likely be surrounded with other people. The first set of examples that drew me in had a sleek and highly contrasted design that I wanted to mimic to create an app that was aesthetically pleasing while being highly visible. Although when I started making mind maps and exploring different colour palettes, I leaned more towards a pagan theme and palette which I chose due to pagans having a rich and diverse music culture that many music artists draw upon in their songs. This gave me a theme to build off which I thought would help me to create my app with more ease as it gave me a better sense of how to set out and style my all the components within my app. I also sketched out some layout designs when exploring my ideas and found myself using a similar layout on most sketches which led to me defining it instead of creating more in order to spend all my time on something that will be used in my app design whether it’ll be in the final design or an early draft that I build upon throughout the design phase. When creating sketches, it also gave me a clearer view on the theme I wanted as while the pagan like theme was something I wanted to stick with, I wasn’t as simplistic as I would like which led to my idea to mix my two previous ideas of a pagan theme with a minimalistic and more streamlined design.