3:6 Branding and Adobe XD

Abi ran a session with us where we had to create profiles similar to the one from our UX/UI workshop but this time for people of our borough’s. We had 6 categories to create a personality from – thinking, seeing, acting, feeling, listening and speaking. Who would your borough be as a person? Me, Sidney and Ronan brainstormed a few ideas for each category and each had to choose one word from each category that we thought best described who Hackney Wick would be as a person.

Mine were thinking – independent, seeing – creativity, listening – radio 6, feeling – defensive, acting – expressive, speaking – well informed. I tried to think about my new idea of focusing on the artists of Hackney Wick and what my type and website would look like.

I then had to choose 3 key words from the 6. I chose Independent, creative and expressive. Steve told us to create a type moodboard for our borough and think of our brand values, visuals, language and systems based off our 3 words. At first, I thought that these all 3 words basically meant the same thing but if that were true then I would have one word. So, I had a lot of thoughts and experimented with different ways I could express all 3 words.

These are my brand values and some rough ideas that I thought related to my values:

I figured the type of people who would use my website are artists, Hackney Wick artists, and those interested in the artists of Hackney Wick. So I created a list of what the potential content of my website would be:

I then focused on the typeface for my branding:

I found fonts online and highlighted the ones that I thought represented my 3 words accurately and was reminded of a collage my group made from different types we found in the graffiti from Hackney and the different store fronts and posters I took pictures of from when I visited Hackney. I noticed that all of the types in Hackney used capital and block, thick letters and they don't look completely neat, they look almost handwritten and have a hint of roughness to them.

I then looked at photography for my website:

I got these from online and from a website called People of Hackney and really liked the photography style. Just a portrait image with some text. It looks plain but I really felt like it represented Hackney very well. I also looked at maybe having a stamp of some sort on the image, just playing around with it.

I then looked at what my website would look like in terms of design:

I found websites similar to what my focus is on and liked how they all weren't crowded and kinda empty but still cohesive. I decided that my website would mainly be almost like a gallery or exhibition where users could come and buy art from Hackney artists, which comes back to my message of wanting to give the artists recognition.

I then focused on the colour palette of my website:

I thought muted colours and offwhites really represented almost the gloominess in Hackney Wick. I created a few different colour palettes and then decided to use one of the pictures Sidney took of a resident in Hackney Wick and colour pick from that and came up with my deciding colour palette which is the 7 colours at the bottom of the picture.

I presented all of this to Steve and he helped me finalise a design that would work for my website and app. I was also worried that I was being too specific only focusing on the artists of Hackney but he reassured me that this was the right thing to do and focusing too much on other things takes away the focus of the website.

We then had a workshop run by Abi, and a guest she brought in called Ali, to teach us more about user experience and how to use Adobe XD. He showed us how to prototype an app for an iPhone and how to navigate from tabs/buttons as well as how to use the scroll feature.