FOOD:SERVICE DESIGN_AHO2022S
Tuesday started off with a quick recap with our project supervisors, activating our heads after a long and comfortable Easter break. Bjørn was happy to be alive and well after being hit with a flu the week before Easter. Anxious to get started, we both rushed into our now well established "office quarters" in AHO's south wing. Benjamin presented his work and feedback, and we jumped into our visual identity finalization, our goal being; concluding a logo, typeface, colors and manual before Thursday. Our work began by exploring typefaces and possible fonts. By previewing a bunch of different options, we got the opportunity to explore all the different ways of displaying our symbol and text together. Grotesque, sans serif, serif, monospaced, script and display fonts were explored. Four of 50 options were selected for further development. We created up to 10 different text and symbol placement options for each typeface, exploring hierarchy and distributed weight.
Wednesday morning started by discussing our project plan in a colloquium with another group. This proved to be a good way of placing ourselves in relation to the deadline coming up in less than a month. Afterwards, we continued our visual identity work. Following our feedback from the discussion two weeks prior to Easter, we looked at including ornamental qualities into our symbol and text. This was difficult. Reason being the contrast in our selected "u/a" symbol and the added detailed ornaments. As a fairly modern and governmental looking symbol, all added ornaments seemed out of place and unbecoming. After working seemlessly for several painful hours trying to combine modern and ancient design, we concluded that perhaps our logo would benefit from avoiding trying to be an intellectual fusion, and rather stay true to one form. This conclusion led us to choosing good ol' Times New Roman as our selected typeface, in combination with our symbol. Ornaments and historical details were however not discarded: these would be optional additions to our logo presentation on selected surfaces later. Furthermore, we quickly explored and chose colors. Having a complex and insightful logo process, choosing colors became easy as they had followed us in our subconscious thus far. A interesting option following our logo was the possibility for local departments of the association to directly edit the logo - giving it a local feel. We imagine this being a good way of including emotions of affiliation to the association and the districts represented. The local department of Aurdal was therefore presented as an example of local adaptation. A quick chat with our prototypist, Hans Jacob, gave us some needed insight on the success of rituals included on a roadtrip.
Thursday morning brought our presentation and feedback on our written task in design theory showcasing the D4Me methodology. Having completed out visual identity Wednesday, Thursday gave us time to refresh our minds on the process we were partaking. This proved to be important, as we had lost some overview during the elaborate hell that is visual identity. Some notes were added to our Miro stages, in addition to writing down and discussion the prototype feedback from Hans Jacob. Later, we began constructing the infrastructure of the association our project has developed into. Creating a hierarchy of the people and links included gave us some overview. A quick revision of our projected user journeys also brought some new thoughts. We concluded that it was time for surface development: where was our association to be represented? On that note, we ended the day.
Friday became a day of webside production and prototyping. Our projected user journeys proved the importance of information flow in a national association. With this in mind we began carefully developing a desktop website in Figma. Taking inspiration from similar associations, we included typical categories and buttons, in addition to adding our own. The prototype was of course channeled through our newly created visual profile, and paid obvious visual homages to both early html-websites as well as modern javascript programming. Having a chat with our new supervisor, Anna, sparked an important discussion on some essential topics, for example use of irony, nostalgia and communication. With an almost finished website prototype, we took a well deserved weekend.
To summerize the week, we produced a lot i four days. Being able to nail down our visual identity, and create a prototype of the associations website felt amazing. The different conversations we had with people proved useful, as they uncovered arguments we have to answer to.
