As the first semester has drawn to an end we have been faced with our final task of the year, “The Convergence Task” this project will be assessed on our ability to demonstrate our understanding of the three key skills areas of digital media practices we have been introduced to over the last 9 weeks of workshops. These areas have included, 2D compositing, digital publishing, interface design and concept development.

As a class we are expected to display both our techniques and skills learnt over the pervious weeks via the creation of a personal portfolio article, or in other words a digital CV, this will be produced using Adobe InDesign digital publishing software. The article will act as an interactive platform of which we are then able to including interactive content and buttons of which the reader will be able to interact with the navigate around the CV. As well as using my digital publication as a foundation to host examples of my works, and hyperlinks to this blog itself.

In my first week of workshops I took part in digital publishing task, of I created a digital publication for a travel magazine, this time round I am able to rebuild on the skills acquired, this time adding my own personal touch and creative design. Together utilising the skill I practiced within the application interface development task to create identity for myself and my publication.

From the interface design and concept development workshop it had become apparent that uniform and identity is an important proportion of digital media construction.  Within the previous task I sincerely enjoyed creating and producing a particular style and identity for our fitness application, choosing fonts, colours and design themes. These aspects of the task and skills use were something I wanted incorporate within my own project, allowing me to give my self a brand identity, that would then flow through out my convergence task.

The idea for the logo emerged when experimenting with a variety of properties within adobe after effects, when I came across the ‘shatter’ effect. I was particularly attracted to this effect and wanted to some how incorporate it within my publication or visual identity.

After some time, I decided that I wanted to use a circular shape of which chose to be orange. After playing around with the positioning of the shatter shape I then saved the frame as an image and moved it over to photo shop for some editing.

I chose the colour of orange to reflect a vibrant and energetic feel though out my brand, This also ties well with the idea that I wanted my ‘brand’ and its identity to reflect my personally.  My brand will operate as a visual communication tool between myself and those reading my work therefor I felt orange was an appropriate colour to reflect both my personality and style of work.

From the creation of the logo I decided that I wanted the circle to a prominent shape that would accompany my orange palate to dominate my visual identity that would then flow through out my cv and even more so my work.

DIGITAL MEDIA - Interface Concept Development Task

'Your overall task is to propose and present a concept as part of a small group. The concept is to be a solution to a real-world problem that a digital media product could help solve.'  

·      Aim - Our aim is to create and interface for a new and up-and-coming application.
 

·      For this task we have chosen to create a ‘fitness’ app from the assigned subject areas

·      We aim to be innovative, interactive, informative and visually stimulating. 

  · When conducting our research for this project,  it became apparent just how many fitness and fitness related applications the market had to offer. With an abundance of both free and paid material there was an overwhelming issue of choice for the consumer. From this we found our problem 'real- world problem' that required a solution. The wealth of fitness apps now clouding up our options is making it much hard for us to choose our ‘ultimate’ fitness application. As is commonly said 'less is more' and from this we wanted to make it our responsibility to help solve this problem by creating a new digital media product 
 

Creating the APP 

 ·     As an athlete myself, my personal experience has taught me that people don’t only apply themselves to one form of fitness, we can be involved in a number of activities from cardio/ running / swimming / cycling to yoga or weigh lifting, and the list goes on. However in our saturated market, there has failed to be an application that has tried to consider various areas. Yet to have an application for each activity of interest seems an inconvenience to the user.

We knew that our the idea at first seemed I little ambitious, but with a strong navigational system and lay out our product should work. The key is navigation! Encompassing this many activates of fitness within to one a plication format may seem over whelming to the users at first, but with a strong grid system in place the user will be able to travel around the app with easy, finding only what they need.

• ·      The second challenge - Our application needed to stand out amongst those already existing in the market for it to be a success. This was going to be a interesting task as so many existing named brands had already created an app, Nike, Nike + running, Speedo’s running app and many more.

• For this we needed to create a strong brand identity, memorable and eye-catching, with a constant theme that continues to feature throughout our app, considering font, style, layout and colour palate. 

Design – Flat design is one of many common design trends to take place at the moment. Flat design, the self-explanatory design, excluding embossing, shadows, and added texture. A great example of this would be the new IOS software for iPhone.

My role 

For this task I personally designed two of our pages, the first was a ‘tracker’ a simple method that allows the user to enter their fitness achievements according to time, and endurance.

These can be manually entered or synced with the users Google maps account for particular sports such as cycling, walking, running, etc However this can also be adapted to any of our other sports, eg, lengths swam / Time taken for the data to be entered manually

Although many apps already include a similar feature to this, I added an additional function to the page. In the bottom corner you can see a small symbol representing a graph, when the user selects this option their results are calculated in a mathematical format, which produces a graph thus creating a visual representative of their progress, average, speed/ time/ through out their week. These can then be compared with previous weeks graphs and future results so that user has a clear and visual representative of their progress apposed to a grid of numbers that show their results.

My second page, ‘Warm up’ a resource page that includes a highly interactive feature that allows the user to select parts of a virtual body. When done so the page fills up with optional stretches, and warm up routines for this particular, muscle, limb body or part that has been selected. If the user likes the sound of one of these activities they can click to select for a more detailed description and diagram of the warm up/ stretch, each of these activities will be tailored to the relevance of the exercise the user first chose from the opening selection menu, eg, swimming, cycling, running etc.  At the bottom of the page sits an additional panel which informs the user of the chosen body part, informing them of its use, and importance, with a brief description of how it works.