Weeks 12 to 15
Week 1: The Freehand MX Interface
In class exercise: The wrench.
Assignment- Create a simple personal geometric logo using circles, squares and lines. (10%)
Week 3- Functional design : Symbols and Instances:
Assignment: Using paper, create a linear drawing of your personal home page.(10%)
Week 4- Functional Design: Importing bitmaps into FreeHand MX
Assignment: Create a comp of your personal Home Page in FreeHand MX (10%)
Assignment: Locate a logo that is particularly effective and be prepared to present it to the class.
Explain why it is so effective.
What message does it convey?
Are there any potential design issues involving its use in web media and what would you do to resolve those issues. (5%)
Week 6- Dimensions of design: Logo creation in FreeHand
Assignment: Create a personal set of letters in FreeHand spelling out your last name. The largest inside square can be no more than ¼ of the full size letter and the maximum number of inside squares is 3.(10%)
Assignment: Create a personal typographic logo. (10%)
Week 9- Forms and Structure: Grid-based interface design.
Assignment: Create an MP3 Player(10%)
Week 10- Icons and Symbols: Developing iconic interfaces for use in web pages and mobile devices.
Week 11- Interface elements
Pop down menus and gif animations in Fireworks.
Week 12- 13- The Email Interface project
Linears: 10%
Comprehensive: 15 %
Weeks 14 and 15 will be presentations of presentations of project work done in class. 20%
Video tour of the FreeHand Interface
Here's an Aqua button:
The G-Wizz Corporation is a supplier of a variety of tools able to reproduce Microsoft Office Documents on handheld devices. This can occur either at synchronization or through wireless means. The company has discovered how to move received email and address from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Entourage onto hand held devices such as Palm Pilots and Sony Cliés. They have determined the key to the success of this product will be the design of a User Interface for the hand held device. This interface should allow the user to scroll through mail and read it, delete mail, access and enter email entries into the address book and send mail from the device. At this stage of the product development process it will be your team's job to design a user-friendly prototype interface.
The typical G-Wizz client is a young urban professional between the ages of 25 And 40. A large percentage of this demographic are males. On line surveys reveal:
97% of G-Wizz customers whosurf the web either have a cable modem or 56K modem.
62% are Mac users. 22% use a PC. 10% regularly use a laptop and the rest use others.
80% of G-Wizz clients are familiar with and regularly use wireless internet connections.
82% regularly spend 2 to 3 hours daily dealing with email.
73% of G-Wizz clients have colour hand held devices.
50% have a Palm and the rest use a Clié.
The goal of the interface project is to develop an interface that is easy to use, instantly understandable and appeals to the G-Wizz market. The underlying theme is G-Wizz users are both hip and businesslike.
With the growth of wireless and hand held device use email clients will become more important. G-Wizz's main competitor is Data Viz's "Mail to Go". The goal is to ally G-Wizz with a younger, hipper more urban demographic than Data Viz.G-Wizz is all about promotion,promotion and promotion. We are attention getters and believe 'buzz" is more important than the written word. That should be the goal of the interface. We are different. We are loud. We have fun.
Hip.Classy.Brash.