Workshop Week 2: BBC User Centered Design

This BBC user experience workshop consisted of three members of the BBC user experience team from manchester. Diverge and converge is a technique in which they use for generating ideas, issues, constraints and goals for there user experience. This is the same process which we would be using to create an outcome for the workshops project.

Red Ant Man Process

This process consisted of getting into groups and drawing a cactus, A man chained to the cactus, ants and an oasis in the distance. This was to help visualise and categories each issue, constraint and goal we had for the john lewis display window brief. 

The John Lewis Brief:

Our task was to create an Inspiring, Inventive, conceptually relevant and eye-catching display for the john lewis flagship oxford street store for the spring season, that reshapes expectations of what shop windows do and can be, but keeps product firmly at its heart.

We decided that we wanted to focus on the concept of integrating mobile phone users who pass by the display’ Generating a new unique advertising idea which would make this particular display stand out from the others.

Here is a photograph of the Red Ant Man process.

Here is a photograph of a more developed Red Ant Man process.

This is an activity I took part in where we took 20 seconds to draw a quick sketch of ideas which we could use for the basis of the project. This quick session of idea drawing would then be discussed with the group and therefore would have to decided between us what ideas to take forward.

This is an activity we took part in where we had to create as many objects within the circles within a minute time limit.

This is the process me and my team took to take the brainstormed 20 second ideas and put them on a chart. The horizontal line represent the effort required to pull of this task.

Right = Low Effort  Left = High Effort.

The vertical line represents the impact that this idea would have on the chosen audience.

Top = High Impact   Low = Low Impact

The goal was to find the perfect balance between effort required and impact gained. Overall me and my team decided that we would look into camera projected idea, where a cameras would be located around the area of the store and portraying them on a screen. This would hopeful engage with the audience, promoting sales for john lewis. The idea was that with the distraction of the camera and screen this would create enough attention that mobile phone users would stop what they were doing an look.

After selecting our idea that we wanted to take forward, we then looked int additional details for the promotion, we decided that it would be a great idea to get a celebrity host for the event, bringing in more custom. However, I did suspect that this idea was a little to unrealistic if we was to keep in mind budget restriction, as celebrates more commonly like to be paid for such events.

Once we had compiled all of our ideas for the store window, we was then set out final task. This task was to create a newspaper article containing a name, photograph, quote and some information about the event. This was done to help visualise what our intention would be for this event and what we would want the public to think of this event also. We decided that a fitting name for our spring store window would be "A Spring In Your Step".

We then presented the idea in front of the other groups, which our idea was met with positive results. I was quite happy with the result of our teams effort in creating this store window theme, and understanding the complications of achieving this.

Just before we left we was told that the BBC was having a UX (User Experience) Design summer placement if anyone was interested. However, I decided not to participate as this is my third UX  workshop this year, so I thought that this would be a waste of time.

G# Minor

This lecture was taken over by Sara. The theme for this lecture was based around the concept of G# minor and focused primarily on motion graphic pieces of work. I quite liked this as I got to see a range of videos, which were creative and utilised sound very well. This video was based on a minimalistic motion format of a graphic notation, showing the music being played by the vibrations of the string.

This was a really interesting concept.

Strings: J.S. Bach - Cello Suite No. 1 - Prelude from Alexander Chen on Vimeo.

This video was created using stop motion, which is a series of photographs taken and pieced together to form a scene. This then creates the obscure frame rate. I have had some experience with stop motion before but never to a scale like this. I have never thought about using this technical process to achieve the visualization of sound. It was at this point I had an idea to use this method to go and take photographs with a camera whilst going on a journey. This may create a unique music video of some sort and would be a nice experiment to try out.


Hyde Park at Night - In Stopmotion from Anatoleya on Vimeo.
AANAATT (by Max Hattler) from Max Hattler on Vimeo.

During the lecture we listened to a couple of songs which included the G# minor, one of the songs of which were Lady Gaga's Poker Face. Sara showed us this song because although more commonly used in older music, it can be used with pop mainstream music.

I really enjoyed this lecture, as it I was shown that many graphical experimentations that I could produce, could use be created in after effects rather than producing stills in photoshop.

Year 1 Final Seminar With James Dyer

For our final seminar with James Dyer, the group was suppose to bring some studio work relating to our final studio, but was the complication of no email being set out to the graphic design group. This unfortunate lead to nobody being able to talk about there studio work. On the other hand we did see some students work online, which was a welcome insight into someone else work and thought process.


SELFS- THE DEFINITION from Isla Miller on Vimeo.

The work presented was an animation called selfs, created by Isla Miller, a student on my course. I really like the animation and thought that the sound choice was perfect for the overall theme that she was trying to capture. Although it was an incomplete version of her animation, I could really visualise the final product, this made me want to utilise my newly founded After Effects skills, over the holidays as I am becoming really passionate the software.

I think that this seminar opened my eyes to what talent we have on our course and how far people have come on our journey as graphic designers. This seminar was a very reflective period for myself, as it created a new driven passion in the creation of my work. This was a nice end to James seminar session for my first year in university, and I look forward to what comes in the future.

Principles Of Graphic Design

In todays lecture we understood the five main principles of Graphic Design.

Proximity - This means the grouping of elements together so that you guided the audience to different parts of the message.

Alignment - Is how the designer generates composition within an frame, not just placing thing central but attempting to scatter and create new layouts,

Repetition - Repeating elements in design can produce visually appealing out comes and ofter do so.

Contrast - To make things stand out, understand that you need to get noticed.

Space -The use of negative space can have a powerful effect on a design, sometimes less can be more.

Meaning And Messaging Seminar Infographic

The task for this seminar was to produce a infographic based on personal information. An infographic is basically an artistic graph, where you record information. The information which we asked for was a timespan of our life, using key moments in our lifes to change the outcome of the position on the graph. For instance, if you created a chart where the lower the line was, the more sad you were at this point and the top being being an happy emotion, then the events which would take place throughout the chart would effect the overall outcome.

This seminar was quite an enlightening experience as I have never created a infographic before. The unique purpose of this, was that there was no limitation to what we could make, as long as we recorded information and did it visually rather than using statistical numbers. I have noticed infographics becoming much more popular with creative CV's as it breaks down the text so that the employer easily see the information and much more clearly, having a bigger impact. Another way I know how infographics are used are within magazines, usually business related so that they can show statistics much more clearly.

Image of an infographic Poster

I really enjoyed this seminar, as we were give a fun and enjoyable task to take part in and experiment with out to transfer statistical information in to a graph and produce it much more visually.