#project2process

[harumidesigns]

Project 2 Process: Sewing

When I made this project, it was my first time using the sewing machine. Winding the bobbin in my own machine seemed much easier to do than when I first saw it in class. But I think the class demonstration helped me learn faster on my machine. 

The yellow swatch is just me practicing running a stitch on the machine. I especially liked that zigzag stitch. It might be hard seeing the stitches. I practiced making a pocket. 

These are my first, practice, rejected stuffed samples. I initially thought of making a lowercase H for the “Oh!” in my piece, but the h I made seemed to thin of a weight. Then it occurred to me all caps would give it a more bold, pop-py vibe I’m aiming for. I also learned how to do the blind stitch and blanket stitch to close up the forms. Closing the forms is my least favorite part, but turning and stuffing it is my favorite!

[harumidesigns]

Project 2 Process: How to Make Pompoms

I learned some new things making project 2, and I would like to share my knowledge with you! 

Above is how I made my pompoms. Pompoms are becoming a popular trend right now, and I thought it goes well with the graphic element of my piece. Not to mention my piece is all about referencing what’s trendy and instagrammable right now!

You can buy pompom makers to make pompoms, but why buy when you can DIY? I am all about spending less and recycling! I used the cardboard in paper towel rolls. Cut a slit like pictured above and that’s it. I was really excited to know we can make our own pompoms. For some reason, I thought pompoms are only made through machines. 

Pompom Tutorial   ...really fun and easy!

You can also do this with forks or 2 cardboard rolls from tissue paper. The size of the pompoms depend on the size of the pompom maker. So if you want tiny ones = fork. Big ones? Use the 2 cardboard rolls from tissue paper. Tutorials below:

Pompoms with a fork

Pompoms with 2 rolls

After some digging in the interwebs, I noticed you can make realistic looking animals with pompoms. Cool, right? Would definitely like to try this and incorporate it to a project.

[vking-dc-blog]

E-Commerce & Usable Style Features

This past week I’ve been trying to understand how an e-commerce site effectively offers a feature (or multiple features) to help customers shop based on a style or a look. I’m working on a project to create a mock microsite for Bed Bath & Beyond. It will enable a customer to browse based on style and to create shopping lists and budgets for decorating a room or an entire home (which in my case would be a room - heyo studio apartment living!). Initially, I didn’t think it would be quite the undertaking that it has become. My viewpoint was one of a user, one that hadn’t considered how much thought and intention sites like One King’s Lane had put into developing features.

One King’s Lane was an obvious initial research point. While this brand has a slightly different business model and a substantially more wealthy client base than Bed Bath & Beyond, the design of the content is pretty well done. The landing page says a few things to me:

Shopping here is safe - you can return things.

You could easily spend hours browsing different looks that OKL has curated. The image above is a truncated version of the “Events” offered on the home page, with the option to see more Events on another page.

I liked the way the top menu was designed to keep track of my favorites. You can easily see that there’s a number next to the heart icon, and that I have something in my cart. When you hover over either of those, you get more information displayed in a clear way.

Upon scrolling down, there are a few more ways to shop.

You can shop by room or Our Shops, and then you can also shop by category. OKL also establishes itself as a thought leader in the high end home decor industry with their blog and their social media accounts. 

I found this helpful for a number of reasons. I’m in the beginning stages of putting my microsite together, and the task of designing something from scratch was overwhelming me with ideas. One King’s Lane does have some differences from Bed Bath & Beyond which will make some parts of their design irrelevant (they have a large number of one-of-a-kind items, for example), but they are extremely effective in letting a customer pick how they want to shop. A challenge I’m seeing now is the one of accounting for budget shoppers. One of Bed Bath & Beyond’s key customers is the college student looking to decorate a dorm room. To them, budget is paramount. Despite this discrepancy in target demographics, taking a look at One King’s Lane has been a helpful starting point for my comparative research.

[designumn2015]

Project 2 Process

This week, my team had to decide how create the final prototype we would present to the class. Up until this point, we hadn’t identified any sort of labor division, so this took some thought. After several tries, we finally came up with a way to divide this project into different tasks that would allow us to each put our own expertise into something without the pressure of a large team discussion. Most of us were tasked with an element of the site to work on. Deciding how to work on this digitally was challenging because we weren’t familiar with any tools that would make collaboration for a graphic design type of project easy, especially since we had different levels of experience with common graphic design tools. As a compromise, we decided the simple shape tools on Google Docs would suite our needs best, and we agreed on a timeline.

[designumn2015]

Project 2: Process Post #2

After we initially came up with a simple prototype in class, we tackled how we were going to present this project, as well as developing a more complicated prototype. Each member of the group was given a topic to talk about. I was assigned the topic of design aspects and further improvements, which I developed a lot of ideas about. Our design is user friendly, with the right amount of information about buildings, routes, etc. Some further improvements I came up with includes real-time walking and bike traffic updates, expansion to a large array of schools, expansion of the app to non-university sites (large cities, airports, shopping areas), etc. 

[beach130]

Process post for Project 2. This is a work in progress of the sketch of our product.

[designumn2015]

Project 2 Process Post #3

The last part of our project was deciding how we wanted our application to look. Thankfully, the Networkers group has a photoshop GOD among us, who has, with our thoughts and ideas in mind, created amazing prototypes of what the BooKlub application would look like on different devices. 

Because there are so many aspects of our application, we had to design what each menu and aspect of the application would look like. Our photoshop wizard did wonders, and made the prototype look extremely realistic, and professional. I can’t wait for the class to see it!

[designumn2015]

Project 2 process post #2

So we came up with our concept, BooKlub, but now our challenge was trying to make the application attractive to people of all ages. So I thought to myself, what is something that we could add to this application that would make it something me and my friends would want to use. So of course, naturally, our group decided to make it a social application as well. Users would be able to have profiles with their favorite books, genres, and be "friends" with their friends who also use the application. Users would be able to make recommendations to their friends, lend friends their books, as well as chat about the books they are reading. Users can also make groups with other users sort of like book clubs.. (That's how we got the name). And our generation needed another social platform... Right?!?! Coming soon.... Our next challenge is to create a prototype...