iPhone Apps: Design for Digital Media Brief

Preamble 

Non verbal communication in the form of pictograms, ideograms and symbols has been with us for thousands of years, and even our modern Latin alphabet is little more than symbols that have evolved over the past several thousand years. Today signage is designed with immediacy in mind, the message or instruction has to be communicated with speed: eg. consider motorway signage.
The focus of this project is upon non-verbal communication, although you are permitted to use some typography where appropriate.
Graphic design is mostly about sending the right message to the right group of people, usually to persuade, educate and inform. The latter of these is what this project is concerned with.
As well developing your computer skills, this project will help you develop your ability to make concrete complex abstract concepts and reduce them to their simplest visual forms whilst retaining meaning.

The Brief
You are to research and design seven icons for Apps for the iPhone.  Present  planning and development for each icon in your sketchbook.
A digital company has produced seven Apps in a series. Each icon should demonstrate the concept of the theme but the icons should also show by their design that they are part of a series.
The seven Apps are all measuring devices:

• Speedometer (measuring speed)
• Pedometer (steps counter)
• Decibel metre (measuring sound)
• Barometer (measuring pressure)
• Thermometer (heat)
• Anemometer (measuring wind) 
• Altimeter (measuring altitude) 

You should use the correct measurements and carefully consider the very small scale of the Apps’ icons. You should also show in your sketchbook the navigation or usability of your App but the App does not need to actually function.

As well as producing seven icons for Apps you should also provide in your sketchbook a competent navigation /usability plan and some thumbnails for the actual pages of one of the above Apps. You do not need to produce final designs for these but your sketchbook work must demonstrate the elements of interactivity within an App.

Learning Outcomes

The specific Learning Outcomes for the module, against which you will be assesses are listed on Moodle and in the Course Handbook. You are strongly advised to make yourself familiar with these and to ensure that throughout your work you are providing evidence of how you have achieved these. Labelling the evidence for each outcome in your sketchbook is highly advised.

Research

You will have to research, amongst other things, non-verbal communication, ideograms, pictograms and icon design.

Final piece entered into competition

 

 Personal opinion on Fur Trade.

I think that the fur trade has and always will have a bad reputation. I don't believe this is in anyway acceptable as a way of fashion. Faux fur looks exactly the same so there is not real reason to have real fur as a garment. The only way that it seems important is people status with wearing real fur, it means wealth and money. 

How do I feel about being made to do this brief by my tutor?

I don't mind about doing this as a brief. I think that it is important the message is out there, within fashion which is where this topic is most hard hitting. I think this was a good one day project, it shocked me to see all the images that I saw, I don't believe in the fur trade so this was quite disturbing to me, but to someone who wears fur I do think that it would need the shock factor to change their minds.