Communication & Interaction

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Project Reflection

Throughout this project I’ve worked on a lot of skills that I didn’t really have before. Mainly being illustrations, I’ve enjoyed using these and working on my skills especially using different techniques that I hadn’t tried out too much before. 

Secondly, I feel that my main point of this project was to create a interactive zodiac piece that would appeal to a wide range and not just be mainly appealing to females. Many illustrations I’ve seen out there are targeted towards women so I hope mine don’t force that perspective. 

I enjoyed creating this project as I was able to be experimental with how I created the components as a lot of it was hand drawn/created and just cleaned up in photoshop. I’ve also learned a lot about Photoshop using tools I haven’t used before such as colour select. 

I still feel a lot of what I have done is still in line with what I had said in my vision statement although I do feel some of the illustrations could have been done with being reworked again but with time constraints it wasn’t possible. I also feel I could have played around with them more to make them pop and make them become more of the focal point as well. 

Overall I’m glad with my progress in this project as I’ve learned a lot with using Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver as well. 

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So this is the final workings of the interactivity. Wanted to show of a brief bit of how each of the buttons work now.

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*for some reason the colours are really strange here*

So I thought I would share a zodiac with each of the main components. Firstly there is the illustration, then the constellation. The constellations have been done dark so that they don’t stand out or give weird looking features to the illustrations. There is then the text which is broken down into three parts: 1, the title in LillyBell, 2: The sub heading in ‘Upper’ Lane and 3. main body text in ‘Narrow’ Lane. 

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So here are the final illustrations/pages for the main navigation screens. Each of the zodiacs have text on the main screen for them as well as the smaller options, navigation buttons and the added extra of the constellation behind the illustrations.

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Project Mini Update

As I started in the presentation review, I’ve been told to add more interactive areas into the mix. I’ve done this by including options on each of the zodiacs the indepth analysis of money, career, love and money. But since I’ve only had a few days in between of presentation and hand in I’ve not added text to each and every zodiac only doing to about 1/2 to give the idea. The other half still work however, just don’t get the information,

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Presentation #4

Last week I had my 4th and final Presentation for Communication & Interaction. This presentation I feel did go well but I was given some ideas to push things a bit more.

The main things brought up in the comments was that again with all the text in context now with illustrations and actual wording it still works and although it is a bit unique and different it compliments it well. I also had people agreeing to do with the reversal of the black to white in the illustrations which was an idea brought up in the 3rd presentation.

The things I’ve been told to consider before hand in was to have more stars displayed. At this stage I would like to go back and maybe add more to the background I feel that this will be a last option as I still have other things that are more needed to be finished of. It was also asked if I was going to have the constellations somewhere which as of writing this a few days after the Presentation has been done. However, they are too bright and are more subtle. 

I was also told to add more interactive parts into the structure so that it showed off more interactive parts better. Again as of writing this a few days after, I have done this but some parts are without text as again it has been a push to get it completed.

Overall, I think the presentation went well and with only having really a few things have to changed by hand in it will be done! 

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For the navigation on the zodiacs I’ve been needing some way for people to be redirected by having either arrows that will go forward/back a zodiac sign and a home button too. 

Since I had been looking at glyphs I looked a bit further to see if there was any that would work for the ideas above. However, I couldn’t find any for forward/back but I did come across a few I thought would work for the home button. In the end I went with the glyph that’s called Lustra and represents ‘The World’ (bottom icon). Using this one to me makes sense for a few reason. 1. because people on earth believe zodiacs and the moon and stars dictate how we go through life and 2. because it is going into this world of understanding. 

I’m glad I kind of rediscovered the glyphs as this icon looks a lot better than it would have if it were just a plain home shaped button.

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So I’ve been looking back at something that came up a lot in my initial research which are the glyphs. The glyphs I seen back at the start were the line symbols that are used for the signs were are partially formed to do with the shapes of the constellations. When I looked into these more more recently I found a lot more glyph styles including ones to do with the moon specifically, the world and personality. 

I really want to try and fit this in somewhere into the project as I think it’ll give it a bit more dimension and it will really work with the rest of the designs. 

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This is the final background created using the textures I made. Most of them were placed and over layed the initial layer. Each one was given a variation of opacity and layering type to create the most interesting texture. 

After this, I then used a gradient so that the colours were a bit more consitent and looked a bit more like the night sky which was what I wanted it to look like.

Once I did that, I went in with some Photoshop brushes and added the white lines and dots which are to represent the kind of stars in the sky. I could add more but don’t want to over do it. 

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Since currently I’m using a place holder ackground I needed to create my own. I’ve decided to take a mixture of watercolour and acrylic paints and play around with them to get different shapes and textures to use in photoshop to create the background. 

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These are the last illustrations completed. I redid some that I had done earlier because I felt the looked a bit creepy/terrifying!

Although I’m still not happy with the Ram I feel at this point it’s more important to get the navigation completed and working 

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Project update

So I’ve been trying to use Flash for the past few days but it hasn’t been wanting to work the way I have wanted it to. It either continues to bug out, crash or just some other problem. I think at this stage it’s much better if I just go and use DreamWeaver instead as otherwise I’m just going to waste time and stress myself out. 

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From the last presentation it was suggested to reverse the black colour of the illustrations to white to make them stand out a bit more. I’ve tried this on both the smaller illustrations and the size they will be at when they are selected. I definitely think the white looks a lot better so will be making all of them white from now on.

—I also like how with the white I can add layer effects and certain ones allow a little bit of colour through which looks really interesting and pretty.

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Presentation 3

For the third Presentation I spoke about how I have decided not to use Storigami, and am currently using Flash to create the interaction but will consider using DreamWeaver instead if I can’t get Flash to work well enough as I’m already having difficulties. 

I also spoke about my typography choices and the current stage the illustrations are at. 

My feed back at this point was mainly to do with the illustrations and make them more consistent like, someone also suggested reversing the colours from black to white. 

David also pushed the idea of using DreamWeaver again so it is definitely something I am going to consider if Flash doesn’t work well. 

People in the class and David like the typography choice as they felt it was really different and unique but still worked well with the style and the overall theme. 

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With this video it is showing how the zodiacs would slide to each other after the navigation button had been selected. 

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So I’ve managed to do some stuff in Flash to try out the different mechanics. This is showing of how each Zodiac would move once it has been selected. 

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So the final choice I made for the text in this project is LillyBelle as the title font and Lane as the Body text. 

My main reason for deciding on Lane was because it has several different variations within the pack so it means I could use a certain variant as sub headings and although it will look different it will still look consistent.