Part 2: The Girl Group says: “You call that a challenge? Design is easy!”
Design is not easy.
Both Anne and I struggled with coming up with really neat and beautiful designs for this project. Early on our group decided (unanimously) that we would focus on making this project visually appealing. We aren’t Superman coders (at least I’m not, I’m starting to think Anne is the Clark Kent of coding) so we wanted the design to stand out more than the gesturing.
Call us selfish, we are both designers and we wanted it to look pretty!
But how do you make phosphates look good? You can’t even see phosphates without a microscope!
We began with the one royalty-free image we owned: the Niagara Suspension Bridge. Initially, our idea had been to import images into the Dazzler (the Gesture Tek application that lets you run their pre-designed gesture effects). So the bridge picture was imported in, we popped some clouds over it and added ripples to the water and that was it.
We knew it wasn’t an amazing design but we were satisfied. I don’t think Jenna was. And after speaking with Lina our fears were confirmed. Let me make this clear, she didn’t hate our design, I think she just wanted to see it spiced up a little more.
So Anne and I took a trip to our friendly neighbourhood library, stocked up on design magazines, figured out our key words (‘kitch-y’, ‘collage-y’, ‘grung-y’… all the good ‘y’ words) and took off for home to create our beautiful designs.
What we came back with was two different designs that didn’t seem to mesh well. Neither design was bad (they just didn’t go well together) so yet again we had given ourselves another challenge.
Did I mention I loved working in this group? Had this been another group we might have had design wars, or created a huge commotion throwing papers in the air, tackling each other to the ground, or refusing to continue the work.
None of this happened because we are all professional, self-assured women/designers. After some discussion, we chose one design and spiced up the other images so they all came out looking like they had the same flavour. The overall design is fun, light-hearted, collage-y, kitch-y, with just a touch of grunge.
Like I said: Design is hard.
– Adrianna
Filed under: The Experience | 1 Comment
Adrianna I love your style of writing!!!!