Mid Term

It is so awful to take half a year off in an American school doing MCQs for finals, then come back to go on honours year and take CS3216. They weren't kidding about the course. Even for my relatively more relaxed role as a designer, I've been putting in a lot of time and effort into making the products. Sustaining at 4 am after 2 naps in the day and a Salon Pas on my back, I'm half doing work for Assignment 3 and half writing this post.

I really like what I do here; it makes me question the past 3 years of an irrelevant degree in languages... ha. Being so new to design, there's so many things to learn and to first discover. Honestly, not knowing much on how to code is a big obstacle; I can't reposition elements to perfection and I can't dictate sudden changes without bringing major headaches to my front-end guys. There is a clear gap between what can be designed and what can be technologically implemented - it's not the most efficient to have to come up with a design and then revise it only after learning about tech restrictions. Plus I don't know what's the coolest way I could go about implementing something, unless I've seen it before.

Working on A3, I have to say that I prefer A3 than A1, because it is easier to not have to completely conceptualize a product from scratch.. One of the first things to do as a designer is to do research, and while I would have to say that there aren't a lot of very similar products out there (the most similar being food delivery apps), it was a lot less nerve-wrecking to come up with the general UI for the product. In A1 we did a Facebook canvas app which I still think is really cool and a product of great effort from the entire team, but I had a lot of difficulties prototyping and always worked late into the night. For A3, there were a lot less drastic changes as I have only one main prototype this time, and Invision proved to be very effective in getting the prototype out. I had a lot more sleep, so that's nice.

One problem I constantly face is the birthing of ideas. We're almost done with most of the UI, with some minor changes to be made here and there, so for the majority of my time now I put my brain into doing the graphics for our app. When I say graphics, I mean visuals to tell a quick story. I actually had a lot of fun doing our graphics and coming up with the copywriting - for once those sociology classes and hot air about symbols and stories come in handy. Our graphics are intentionally simple - who wants to overload the user amirite - and the icons are a piece of cake, but piecing the story together was a horrible (though enjoyable) time because of the conceptualisation.

Anchor Shiba telling the story of my life

P.S.: On recommendation, I've changed the font size for my posts, but while the font itself still isn't quite the invitation to read... this is my strategy to put people off reading

Just kidding I just don't want to spare time to go change it