OUGD504- Studio Brief 01 Evaluation

When this brief was initially given to us before summer, I was very excited about it because the brief was incredibly open and allowed us to create a guidebook on anything we wanted to. As my idea was to create a guidebook for creative students in Manchester, it meant I was able to visit the city and take a lot of images and gather information to include within the publication. I wouldn’t be being incredibly honest if I didn’t say I was extremely disappointed when we had to swap our idea with another peer. I had spent a lot of time planning out how I wanted the publication to look and was excited to create something in my own illustrative style. I do understand that the brief swap does have its benefits and it does reflect what client work may be like in the future, however I did begin to feel incredibly uninspired and I am not completely happy with the end product. My work thrives at its best when I am incredibly excited about my project and the work I am researching, although the brief I did have to work with was interesting and it brought in lots of elements of humour, there were still parts of it that I found difficult to complete and I do think my final outcome is not something that the client truly had in mind. On the positive side of this, the peer I worked with was incredibly helpful and I did not feel lost or confused as she provided exactly what she wanted to be included within the publication. The brief in itself has been useful and has allowed me to use the print room and learn how to set up a publication in InDesign and print it out in a high quality. When it came to assembling my publication in InDesign I was confused to how it should be laid out and how the pages matched up, but luckily printing in the digital print room taught me how to go about this, this means I have it for future reference now.

OUGD504- Ideas feedback

Feedback from peers about my design ideas

Comparing the prices
Cheepest supermarkets
Make it more accessible to students
Illustrations so they don't have an expectation of the photograph
Simple language

OUGD504- Design Inspiration

Katie Vernon

This design that I found on Pinterest caught my eye instantly because it is very much similar to my style of work and the injection of simple colour doesn't overcomplicate the design. Bringing in elements of text to the design and adding the instructions to the image makes it a lot more interactive.

Charlotte Trounce

This design again is quite simple, the illustrations are very straight forward and you can instantly tell what the drawing is of. The only thing that I don't like on these particular illustrations is the text at the bottom, I think its quite hard to read because its extremely small.

Ryo Takemasa

I like this style because the images look almost vector with the sharp and smooth edges and simple design. The images also appear to have texture to them which adds a lot more dimension to them instead of them just being completely flat and 2D, it gives them a lot more character, almost more pleasing and appealing to the eye. Takemasa's work always uses texture within his images and I think this is something I am going to experiment with, especially with food illustration.

OUDG504- Target Audience research

Target Audience:

STUDENTS 18-22 STUDYING AT UNIVERSITY

I intend to market/target this app for students, being a student myself I can fully understand the problem that I am going to address in order to complete this brief successfully. For an app, its important to have the target audience at the forefront of your mind all the time as they are the ones that will be using it. I think in order to get the necessary research in order to design this app in the best way possible I need to speak to students and work out/ask what they would want out of a cooking app and find out what daily problems they encounter when it comes to cooking a meal. In terms of the app design and marketing, its important to look at existing apps that these ages tend to use everyday and see what similarities they may have or what draws them into downloading the app in the first place. 

Most common apps used among 18-22 year olds:

Facebook

Instagram

Twitter

YouTube

Words with friends

These are the most popular and used apps among 18-22 year olds, its not surprising that these were the apps that came to light because I myself mostly use these on a daily basis and the majority of other students that are around me use them too. I think the thing that stands out most that all these apps have in common is that they are social and interactive with other people, it allows the user to have convocations and share their lives with other friends and people they know. Although my app is not directly a social media app, I can bring in elements of interaction with other students. 

To really understand what a student may want from this app, its best to ask questions and find out how they feel about cooking at uni...

What do you find difficult about cooking at uni?

• Choosing what to make
• The motivation to cook something after a long day
• Choosing the right time to know when to start cooking and how long it will take
• Choosing pasta all the time because everything else seems like a chore
• Thinking of new meals and not making the same thing
• Recipes with loads of ingredients in that will never get used again 
• Making meals out of random things in your cupboard

OUGD504- Interface design analysis

Tasty

I knew this app exists because one of my house mates tends to use it quite regularly and she finds it really useful and simple to use. Upon searching through the app and looking at the various recipes they have available, it seems like they have a huge selection of various recipes for all kinds of meals and even deserts. The app shows you a sped up, quick version of someone making the meal, this could be quite useful for people that may not know how to do certain things. There are step to step instructions on how to prepare and create the meal which means the user of the app can follow it all clearly without any confusion. I like how the app has real photography of how the end product of the meal will/should look and the categories that they are all split into. It also gives you the option to save recipes so you can access them again if you like them.

Jamie's Recipes

This app is what I expected it to be like, it has been created by Jamie Oliver and includes his own recipes. The app gives you 15 new recipes to choose from every Monday which means it is constantly updating with new meal ideas so the user doesn't get bored or the ideas become repetitive. The design of this app is very plain and simple, it sticks to a white and yellow theme throughout and includes photographs of the meals when they are finished. I didn't like this app as much as the other one because to me it was quite boring and dull, it had nothing exciting or innovative about it. Having said that it is what I expected from an app by Jamie Oliver, they haven't been designed to be simple and quick recipes.

Yummly

Yummly was the final app I came across which was free, I had never heard of this app before so decided to try it out. It was a lot like the two previous apps- I'm still to come across a food app that has something different about it/different layout/format/concept. Like the Jamie Oliver app, it gives you lots of different recipe ideas for you to then click on and follow the instructions. The only slight difference to this app is that when you click on the recipe it takes you to more of a website that seems to be separate from the app- the design of this part of the app isn't that great and put me off from using the app.

KITCHEN STORIES

This is the first thing you will see when the app is open, it appears with the logotype of the app in a bold black font, with the slogan 'anyone can cook' underneath. The type is directly in the centre of the screen, surrounded by an all white background, this is an incredibly minimalistic opening to the app, however I don't think that matters too much because this bit of information isn't that important and people won't be paying much attention to it because they will just want to interact with what the app has to offer, people have downloaded it for the recipes. 

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These are the next steps you are faced with when entering the app, figure 1 gives you the option to choose whether you have been on the app before or if you are new to it. As I had never been on this app before I selected 'I am new', this brought up the images on figure 2-5, by this time I had got a bit bored of flicking through each of the screens that came up because it was taking a while to actually let me get into the app and browse through all of the recipes and other information. Despite this it did give you the option to skip through all of this information but I don't think it was necessary or relevant to have 3 different screens coming up before the app opens properly. Finally it then let you create an account if you wanted to, I like how it gave you the option to not create an account or sign up/use your email address or sign up with Facebook, this is a good variety of options to select from and choose the best suited for what you want. 

Each of these screens have a small video in the background which I think makes the app interactive and a bit more exciting for the user instead of just flicking through flat screens with no movement to them. The colour scheme of what seems to be at this point white and yellow is consistent on each screen and I think the colours work well alongside each other, the app is kept quite minimal.

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This next screen shows what appears when you select the home page button at the bottom of the app, it gives you options to look at the top story which is updated daily. It also shows you the newest available recipes that have been added to the app. It splits them into categories so you can access the kind of recipes you want to look at and want to cook. The app is easy to navigate around because you can clearly see the areas which you need to press in order to get to a certain place in the app.

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There is a 'how to' section on the bottom of the app also where it provides short videos that show you how to do certain things. There are different sections to this part of the app such as shown above in figure 7, the 'knife skills' and 'everyday basics'. I like how they provide videos with sound as they are a lot more useful than just following instructions, they are a lot more informative and interactive with the user rather than them just reading from the app.

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On this section of the app, it takes you to the top featured recipe. In this case its how to make a boiled egg, upon selecting this it takes you to something that almost looks like a blog. The author has wrote a bit about the secret of a poached egg, it introduces you to the recipe before showing you a step-by-step guide. This makes the app a lot more interactive to the user and the steps seem quite simple and straight forward, they get to the point of the steps so the user doesn't need that much knowledge and experience.

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This final option gives you the option to watch a video or read the recipe on how to create something. This example shows how to make a beetroot cake, the video has been shot from above the person creating the meal so it shows you every angle so you can clearly see how and what is being made.

OUGD504- Final Booklet

Below are images of my final printed booklet, I am planning to take more 'professional' looking photographs to present on my design boards when I come to do them.

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Figures 1-3 show the front cover of the booklet, I was pleased that each page printed out correctly and there were no mistakes made. The only difficulty I had with putting my book together was that it needed to be printed out on A3 paper in order for the pages to fit and the size/shape remained the same as I intended it to be. I intended to print the publication on glossy paper, however I was advised that this would not be the best paper to print on in terms of how it would look from screen to paper and binding it into a publication. In the end the paper I printed on was more of a satin gloss, it created more of a magazine feel, I think this paper stock is appropriate to the brief because the target audience is millennials therefore keeping the cost at quite a low price would be beneficial as the publication would retail for around £5.

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The rest of the images show the inside of the publication, page by page. I am happy with the way this publication printed, I was hesitant to use the digital print room as it would be quite expensive for the amount of pages that I would be printing. However, I don't regret this decision because it meant the quality of the pages and the images etc were not restricted and the end product is something to a high standard.