NMIX 6011: New Media Design
One of the things I am finding most beneficial about the EMO program is my ability to take the experience and knowledge I am gaining and make it actionable immediately in my daily work. For example, I have adopted a service-based, customer-focused mindset and have naturally gravitated toward a more user-centered approach to design over the last several years. I have been making suggestions to that end for a while at work that I can now see being acknowledged and accepted more readily — such as allowing more white space into designs and using more inclusive langage. Some of that can be attributed to a recent change in leadership but only in the sense that it has encouraged our organization to embrace new things. I have no doubts I am also articulating my ideas and justifying design decisions with more confidence and clarity than I was able to before taking this class.
That’s actually what motivated me to take this course rather than seek an exemption. I am a seasoned designer, but I’ve never had formal design training. That has inevitably created some internal doubts about my style, my abilities, my approach. The fear that I had missed something foundational in my self-directed learning has been real. Thankfully, this course has remedied that. Each lesson reinforced the principles I have been building on and gave me a few new techniques for putting them into practice.
Project 1
Project Postcard, which called on us to design throwback postcards, was a nice way to jump into this class. I saw it as an opportunity to do something I don’t do very often: design for myself. I enjoyed the whole process, from photographing my neighborhood to choosing the best images to picking a font that really captured the personality and style of the community in which I live. Normally, I would stay away from fonts like the one I chose, but it worked well on so many levels. I got to play with the font’s different ligatures, editing them and combining them into something new, the kind of design I haven’t done in a long time. It felt a bit indulgent but also like something I should incorporate into my routine in some way to help keep the creative spark alive. Sometimes it’s good just to play. That's something we were reminded several times in this course: If you are not enjoying the design process, it will show in the finished product. I had so much fun with this one, I actually ended up with two designs, though I only submitted the one on the left after deciding the one on the right had veered a bit too much into vintage Christmas card territory.
Project 2, Part 1
The remainder of New Media Design was a group project divided into two parts. First, we came up with a product and then developed its identity to be expressed and reinforced through a brand guide created in Canva. It was a bit of a learning experience for me in that I had never used Canva before. While I am quite familiar with branding and why it works, I certainly have never created a brand from scratch via Slack with virtual strangers! It's an intense but very worthwhile exercise, building from the ground up in this way, as it takes you through the design-thinking process. I was blessed and cursed with a heap of empathy, which is part of what draws me to this field. I tend to be a problem-solver. I have a lot of ideas, and I draw inspiration for those ideas from literally everywhere. I like to say I can get a graphic design idea from a shoe rack (because that actually happened once). The most important part of this for me was realizing I am not just interested in UX. I am interested in it.
For this part of the project, I contributed the name Auregale, an idea for a band name I had been carrying around in my head for probably a dozen years. This made-up word is a combination of the words aural (sound, hearing) and regale (celebrate, fete), which is expressed in our tagline,“A celebration of sound,” to help define a line of headphones for the HoH and deaf community. I also helped choose the colors and formatted and laid out our style guide.
Project 2, Part 2
We were introduced to Figma to further develop our brand from Part 1 with interactive prototypes for a mobile website, a desktop website and an app. Figma itself is a great brand with a great logo, nice branding and a really cool product and philosophy. The concepts they touch on in their guide on design are very much in line with my own thought processes and experience, all of which adds to what is a very nice environment to work and collaborate in. Figma excels at helping designers develop a mobile-first approach, which is something I know I need to work on. It is difficult to get out of desktop mode sometimes, especially when you work on a laptop all day. This class has pushed me and others at my job to think about that more and take steps to address it in a current upcoming product launch. Because of my interest in user experience and how easy Figma makes it to map all that out, I would like to continue using it in my daily work and possibly for my capstone.
For this project, I did all the products pages for our prototypes and laid out what our ideal journey through the app would look like. My idea for our app was one that would enhance user experience with our product. Because our headphones feature vibrating ear pads, I suggested a companion app with curated playlists as well as a way to customize vibration levels on the user's headphones and then save those setting to the user's profile. Below is a progress shot of the product pages in the app.
