Category: Practice

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CU – App Mockup

For the Collaborative Unit, my team is making a shop discovery app. It’s like making Yelp and Trip Advisor, but for specialized fashion boutique targeting students in London. I challenge myself making a mockup for the app. Our plan was to create screens and place it, but I watched quite a lot of tutorial and felt challenged to do the wiring as well to make it like a good demo.

Before we make it, I found that typeface and colours are important aspects of designing a brand identity–which then will be the base for designing the app.

Based on the data, we decided to use sans serif typeface, Futura PT, for the font as we want our identity as a brand that simplifies the users’ lives. We want the app to be easy and simple to use. For the colour, blue and green are the safest choices for a brand that targets both male and female so we chose blue as our core colour, complemented by brown.

The top part are the screens for our app, Arkive. The bottom part are the assets (icons, templates, etc) we’re using to create the design.
Wiring of the app so the transitions will be like in a real app.

Instead of just making the design for the screens, I try wiring it using time, tap and animation to make the experience of the viewer better.

Examples of the screen that we made.

I can’t include the whole video of the demo as the editor won’t let me embed the video from Youtube for some reason so I put them into two .gif files.

I enjoyed making this demo and I think this will be useful for my own pitch for Digital Concept and Strategy later!

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DCS Practices – Object Study 2: vintage victorian lamps fairy tale and ivory knights

Another set of characters inspired by vintage victorian lamps and ivory goblets (I tend to draw with my book slightly slanted to the left so please bear with the tilted drawings) .

Just realised one of the characters resembles Lilymon.. watched Digimon recently so that’s probably why
The bird was my attempt on making non human so I tried copying some mythical birds.. not the best result but better than expected
Forgot to save the image and couldn’t find the exact pink lamp that inspired me so the comparison is a bit off

As for these ivory goblets, I found them hilarious. I’m quoting Soth (2020) here, “a species of ivory oddities so exuberantly impractical, so elaborately absurd, that they appear, even in person, like spontaneous deformities of reality.” When I first saw them, a scene with a group of conceited, comical knights with strong individual characters trying to outdo each other immediately came in mind. But these are rough sketches and I’m thinking of refining it to look more like knights.

Anyway, I was having soooo much fun while drawing them. Probably the most fun I’ve been this quarantine.

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DCS Practices – Object Study 1

It’s been three years since I’ve been properly drawing. I always draw rough sketches with people with no faces and faces without bodies.

Now I’m trying to draw properly again, as I want to learn more about 3D and animation later. I would love to see my drawings turn into an immersive experience. I found some images that piqued my interest:

From top to bottom: @shycocoa, @tamtadi, @zenmaibook and @fashion.biologique

Making characters out of an object or animal is really clever. We may or may not realise that we got influenced by our environment, the nature around us and inspirations can come from so many resources. I believe that fashion doesn’t have to be inspired by fashion–I enjoy looking at things outside of fashion to get inspired. And it’s been a desire of mine to create character designs as well.

This one is inspired by a grieving set designed for life on Mars. I added clock on the character as time is one of the symbol of death and the thin pillars looked like spider legs for me.

This second drawing is inspired by vintage victorian lamp. I made the top part of the lamp as its headdress and the body as a fan/stick. The shape of the dress reflected the bottom of the lamp, and the butterfly on top moved to the dress. This is the first time I’m using and combining a lot of colours so I’m really happy with the result! I’ll continue this practice!

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Editing Practice

Ever since I came to London, I tried my hands on anything that I can try, one of them is editing images. I have some projects back from home that hasn’t published yet and needed some editing to make it more appealing. My friends who helped me edit the photos is currently busy so I attempted to do it myself.

Violet Stellar
Because the photographer usually does commercial work, the editing became somewhat commercial too. The character that I made seemed too pretty–while I aimed for quirky as she’s like a princess gymnastic from another galaxy. And because this was a beauty shoot, the dynamic of the poses was limited. I edited the pictures to ‘scanned old magazine’ feel in order to town down the prettiness.

Twin Moon
For the first two photos, I cleaned the background and gave a little correction to the brightness, contrast etc. Then I added some ‘anime’ effects because in my head they’re space rangers who roam the galaxy to safe people–in anime style.
For the second one, I practised on correcting skin colour and smoothen it. If you look closely, you can tell the differences between before (left) and after (right).
For the last one, I did the same skin colour correction and added some sparkle to further heighten the edginess of the characters.

Uranus
As the God of the sky, I wanted to make Uranus more ‘fairy-like’. My friend helped me turned the sky to blue (it was flat white), then I added planets/stars on the sky to emphasizes ‘outer space’. I also gave her fairy wings and butterflies friends.

Overall, I feel satisfied with the pictures and proud of myself since I edited them only with guides from Youtube and Google. From now on, not only doing pre and production, I want to make more materials to hone my post-production skill.