SVR Sense

senseStrategies for Visual Research

sense.id-london.co.uk

http://sense.id-london.co.uk/

CONTENTS

03 10ISSUE, AUDIENCE & CLIENT

FORMAT

12 13COLOUR SCHEMES EXPERIMENTING WITH BRANDING

22 27BRAND IDENTITY CONTENT RESEARCH

35 41CONTENT PAGES SOCIAL MEDIA

47 PROJECT SENSE

INES STUART-DAVIDSON

ISSUE: ENVIRONMENT- REUSE

To reuse is to use an item again which includes conventional re-use, where the item is used again for the same function and new-life reuse where it is used for a dif-ferent function. By taking useful products and exchanging them, without reprocessing, reuse helps save time, money, energy, and resources. In broader economic terms, reuse offers quality prod-ucts to people and organisations with limited means, while gener-ating jobs and business activity that contribute to the economy.

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ISSUE: ENVIRONMENT- REUSE

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Reuse is a means to pre-vent solid waste from entering the landfill, im-prove our communities, and increase the materi-al, educational and occu-pational wellbeing of our citizens by taking use-ful products discarded by those who no longer want them and providing them to those who do.

TARGET AUDIENCE: YOUTH

Youth is the time of life between child-hood and adulthood, that identifies a particular mindset of attitude. Often youth is associated with having little ex-perience, immaturity and freshness and are influenced by peers, gender and cul-ture.

This generation is constantly promoting themselves and stay connected in being incredibly digitally enabled.

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The web allows youth to connect on a global scale with people going through the same biological, psychological and social changes. The internet has become the place where young people find the opportunity to explore and express their identities, their social relations and navi-gate through their values that are on of-fer around them.

Youth fuse their social lives in technolo-gy, not the other way round and content is the social currency. Brands embrace social media in which they don’t dictate but engage youth by offering them con-trol.


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This book was useful refering to Genera-tion Y, people that cover 40% of around the world. 13 to 29 year olds are the most marketing savvy and advertising critical generation ever and have a big impact over society and business.

Ethical, green and charity issues are a growing concern for this generation and it’s important for them that they don’t just get bombarded with traditional charity programms but that they can make a difference by owning the values and choosing how and where charitable contributions will go.

CoolRealUniqueSelf Brand IdentityHappiness

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BrandConversations

Brand Image

Brand Leverage


CLIENT: LONDON COUNCILS

London Councils is commited to fighting

for more resources for the capital and getting the best possible deal for London’s 33 local

authorities.

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Much of their work con-sists of lobbying the

government and others on behalf of the member councils to protect and enhance council pow-

ers to enable them to do their best possible job for their residents and local

businesses.

They develop policy and do all they can to help

the boroughs improve the services they deliver. Lon-don Councils runs a range

of services themselves, designed to make life bet-

ter for Londoners.

CLIENT: LONDON COUNCILS

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The Capital city is the largest metropol-itan area in the UK and largest Urban zone in the EU by most measures.

Londonwide and local campaigns aim at increasing peoples awareness of the value of reducing, reusing and recycling waste, providing tools and information to help people do the right thing.

London produces around 20 million tonnes a waste a year and has vast amounts of trade, research and crea-tive facilities that can be used to create awareness and inspire.

CHOICE OF FORMAT

I would like to make a website that will encourage young peo-ple to reuse and recycle their items, creating positive emo-tions and individual empowement. Providing information on alternatives with their interests in mind, allowing them to choose where and how their charitable contributions will go.

The website will be designed to pull information together into one space from different types of mediums and will therefor use no paper or waste.

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CHOICE OF FORMAT

Facebook allows brands to circu-late images with their target audi-ence and keep them informed.

Brands interact with their target audience in images and recogniz-able bold typography.

Photography and style are eye- catching and brands now portray adventure and landscapes.

Using imagery that understands young peoples lifestyles and in-terests is very creative.

Blogging is a powerful tool for young people, they can choose what they post and circulate.

Blogging is relevant to youth cul-ture today, they can follow others depending what they believe in.

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COLOUR

Our preference for a spe-cific colour can be related to how we feel in any situ-ation, how we want to feel, and even how we remem-ber certain experiences. I’d like to stay away from obvi-ous the green.

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EXPERIMENTING WITH BRANDING

I started creating content by collected materials, resuing from maga-zines which was effective with my peers when evaluating our work. The website was split by three main pages of ‘Reduce, Reuse and Re-cycle’, ‘Knowlegde’ and ‘Trade and in the second sidebar it featured a community website, a blog and what the website is about. The website creating tool I’m using is Wordpress, which is easily interchangeable.

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I used a collage effect by reusing images from magazines, which would tie in with recycling. The imagery is quite dark, in that the trees are going through death and smoke is filling the sky. The gen-eral feedback I got about the imagery was that it would limit my target audience and may not be friendly enough. The header im-age covered all the pages and was too big.

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The website had a different name, ‘Mirage of Progress’, which didn’t come across as positive so in terms of typography there was only what was in the collage, which I reused from a magazine and thought they would be quite sarcastic. The negative of using red and black is that it portrays defiance, aggression and oppression.

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I decided to change the layout and style of the website and re-searched into a few other methods that could engage your target audience, which included a swap shop event page, a shop consist-ing of clothing, a free magazine and a page that pulls in the sup-port of popular youth brands. The menu of the website became too large and started to become more of a clothing company than a informatial website. Creating a magazine would use paper and falls away from a paperless idea.

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The feedback revealed that the branded eye was effective, yet the colours were a bit too hippy although the website targets the wider audience more. The font was too big as the header and I needed to focus on the defined ideas and develop the branding before I could go any further. I also changed the name to something lighter.

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The menu became too broad and the website lost its intended pur-pose, which meant I would have to redesign the brand. The choice of imagery portrayed humour and creativity and the tesselation of images on the homepage was effective, yet it felt a bit hippy still.

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The website needed to be more defined, and the change of the logo and images on the homepage visualised the content of the website. I asked users and experts to test the website, receiving different lev-els of feedback between the people that would use such a website and those that would create such a project. The homepage was effective, yet needed more work and the layout still looked much like a blog that a customised theme was needed.


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The logos ‘n’ and ‘e’s are awkward and was to be changed, but the same technique was used for the background. The image shows a sheet of plastic on physical print-ed paper.

TARGET AUDIENCEFEEDBACK“It clearly says

what it’s guided towards through

short information-al text that can be

easily seen.”“The use of the main colour blue has a calming ef-fect, it may also be a reference to the sea.”

“The layout is

eye catching and

seems stylish/ strik-

ing, the pictures

help explain what

it’s about.”“It’s good!”


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EXPERT

FEEDBACK”It has taken 20 seconds to load the site. Also, you use the word platform in your description, but I get the sense that it is more of a magazine, offering content. When something is a platform, I expect to login and have a sense of com-munity. But maybe that is something I missed in my quick review of of the site.”

”It’s not garish

and because

it’s not green

it doesn’t put

you off straight away.”

The imagery relates to the content of the website a lot more than before and the tesselated layout along with the choice of imagery could be expanded a lot more.

BRAND IDENTITY

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BRAND IDENTITY

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The logo font is ‘Open Sans Bold Italic’ and looks cleaner than the version before. There is more noticable space in all the letters and the italic still gives it a nice flow with less emphasis on the ‘n’. The main header text is ‘Dosis’ which makes the text feel light. I’ve kept the blue and white theme, as visually white gives perception of space, whereas blue is the colour of the mind and is essentially soothing. Strong blues will stimulate clear thought and lighter, soft blues will calm the mind and aid concentration.

BRAND IDENTITY

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I changed the homepage imagery to a colour them, including more content related and with my the help of my dad, a web designer, coded a function to change the opacity on the images so when the mouse went over, the images would be interactive and introduce the content of the pages with a short description. By uploading im-ages saved for websites the problem of the page slowly loading was fixed and the colours tied in with the branding on the homepage.

BRAND IDENTITY

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Originally there was no back-ground, but this idea of hex-agonal shapes was originally from ideas at Context Free Art and represents the honeycomb effect and like bees, ‘we are all workers’.

A guy called Aza Raskin (http://www.azarask.in/blog/) who was creative lead for Firefox rewrote the algorithms in javascript and created a site called Algorithm Ink- http://azarask.in/projects/algorithm-ink

He posted the code for people to use at http://code.google.com/p/contextfree/source/browse/#svn%2Ftrunk and my dad modified the code to embed the algorithm to make it work as a full screen background layer and then “minified” to make it as small as pos-sible (12kb). Each time the page loads, a new pattern is created.

BRAND IDENTITY

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After changing the background and waiting for it to cover the screen, I noticed that the menu buttons were too blocky, so the borders were coded to have the hexagonal shape ends and an opacity was added to soften the white. The menu and content will have to be clear and to-date with the right use of language.

We were told to find questions relating to the project and I needed to engage with my audiences behaviours and utilise the social net-works available to young people. Through networks like these, I would gain awareness with my audience and share content with them through other sources as well.

CONTENT RESEARCH

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Google and Facebook have been a vital tool for this generation, these are huge spaces accessible for ex-ploration to find whatever information they need to know or whatever their interests are.

This generation are constantly reinventing what they like and now-adays every young person has a camera with them at all times. Whether they use Tumblr, Pinterest or Instagram, these mediums are letting them be creative with their own interests in mind.

This generation consumes vasts amounts of materials and shops are increasinly offering their customers recycling services, that of-fer them money or are charitable. Twitter can update on-the-go on how to save money and where to recycle based on their values.

CONTENT RESEARCH

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Essentially, Facebook is a really useful tool to collect content to-gether that interests the target audience. I’ve since followed more than 100 related projects by others that I can use content from. I can utilise Facebook for sharing and the website for their content.

CONTENT RESEARCH

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These tools offer more types of content, so I can choose which content to collect to-gether. These examples are regularly updated so I can keep adding specific con-tent to the website.

CONTENT RESEARCH

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There are services in London that provide information for what-ever time of year and people who pick up unwanted items all year round.

CONTENT RESEARCH

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I will also include content that recycles and reuses for charity. It gives young people an option whether they want to recycle to do-nate or whether they want to make money from their items.

CONTENT RESEARCH

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CONTENT RESEARCH

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I would like to collect a vari-ety of sustainable products that represent the target audiences interests, such as laptop cases, clothes hangers and lighting that serve new purposes. The content of products will ca-ter for males and females.

CONTENT RESEARCH

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I would also like to target my audience through creative infor-mation, that will provide articles on what creative people have achieved, whether it be artists, designers, architects and fashion designers who are utilising sustainable materials or awareness.

WHAT WE DO

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‘What We Do’ explains the intent and content of the pages in ‘Infor-mation’, ‘Creativity’ and ‘Trade In’ and uses no language relevant to reusing apart from the explanations. For the headers of the pages, I’ve steered clear from the obvious language of reusing so that it feels more natural to the target audience.

INFORMATION

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On the image above the different posts are sit-ting over a border with an opacity, enought to see the background and to still be able to read the information. The post is also featured with an image into the article.

To the left is the full ar-ticle, which background also has an opcacity. On all pages to the right is an informational box about the project for when people get direct-ed from google to an ar-ticle.

CREATIVITY

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This page will include existing practice such as galleries, exhibitions and creative ways of recycling materials for creative purposes. This page will give young people the option to submit their own work to the web site to share with others their age. This can also help with research for other people’s projects in finding related work by others. Some of the posts fall under the other categories as well, including the ‘news feed’ page where posts are filed under ‘All’.

TRADE IN

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This page provides information on current organisations and busi-nesses already involved in reusing materials and where to go if you An idea was to use an image or infographic that showed whether this post would be for a donation or for getting money, so that they can quickly decide what they want. However the quick mock up images showed that in ‘News Feed’ it would look irregular with the posts from the other pages. I wanted to keep the imagery con-sistent and it works really well quickly showing the featured article content. ‘Trade In’ uses the image to show them the brand, which is more effective. Seeing that young people can easily navigate them-selves online, I used tags as short informational words for the post.

”Interactive page images would help say what the content is about.”

SWAP SHOP

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As this is a live website, I intend to carry on with this project as it’s interesting for myself to find out all this new information. One of the ways I thought I could target a young audience was through a ‘Swap Shop’. This idea is cur-rently in development with an Events Manage-ment graduate who is interested in hosting an event with music.

The example above is an online swap shop where people can up-load their items and get points for doing so. Deciding on an actual event allows users to take home items on the same day and to meet others or their friends. The downside is that working with others on such a project isn’t as flexible as by yourself.

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NEWS FEED

‘News Feed’ brings all the pages together and also acts as a blog so I can post entries that have no categories in the other pages.

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SOCIAL MEDIA

With Facebook I can post any-thing from articles (& links) to images to those that ‘Like’ the page. I use Facebook as a tool to follow relating content.

Pinterest allows me to pin imag-es on different boards so I can use this for the ‘Creativity’ page. This website also lets me follow relating content that I can use.

With Twitter I can post links to content and post ‘Tips & Tricks’ to people on the go.

With Tumblr I will upload con-tent with articles and mainly images that will circulate.

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JETPACK- WORDPRESS

Jetpack is a plugin that connects to WordPress.com and enables great features, powered by their cloud infrastructure. It has popu-lar features provided for the convenience of not having to install and manage several separate plugin installations, such as ‘Shar-ing’ which connects you to the social networking sites so that once you update a post on the website it shares it will the social medi-ums. Therefor it is quicker than uploading posts to indivual social networing sites and Jetpack itself, is free.

FACEBOOK

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The website uploads the content to Facebook, which can generate an audience and I can see how many people have viewed each post. On the website I can then see that my target audience has been redirected from Facebook or other social networking sites.

”Facebook is good because you can add people and gain awareness like that for the website.”

TWITTER

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Using social networks allows me to follow others that can provide me with content that I can share. Twitter is customisable and there-for I have kept in theme to the website. It’s likely I will get a smaller amount of people coming through Twitter than Facebook.

”The feed allows

people to read

from their phone

when they’re

on the go when

they are linked

to social pages.”

TUMBLR

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Wordpress updates Tumblr whenever I’ve posted up an article and with the theme I’ve found, tesselates the images of the articles to-gether. These articles are linked back to Wordpress. The tesselation of the images works effectively by viewing all the content together and lets people share posts based on their interests. I have set up a Sense on Tumblr from my personal aaccount and I already have followers, so I can introduce this project through my personal page.

PINTEREST

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Pinterest is the only social site where I will have to update the con-tent images manually. I’ve ‘board’ categorised the images and dis-played the website URL along with each post to link them together.

PROJECT SENSE

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The final amendments to the homepage changed the menu, where it now highlights what page is displayed by changing it blue. The interactive image texts have been updated to the relevant informa-tion about the contents of the pages. www.sense.id-london.co.uk

http://sense.id-london.co.uk

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PROJECT SENSE

The font in the search bar changed to Dosis, keeping a consist-ent theme throughout. The order of the social networking buttons were changed, creating ‘FTP’, standing for File Transfer Protocol and changed the shape to make them rounded. The search bar has been aligned with the ‘Welcome to Sense’ information box.

I went back to ‘What We Do’ to edit the text to make it sound more natural and simple.

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PROJECT SENSE

The ‘Information’, ‘Creativity’ and ‘Trade In’ pages all have category images that are positioned under the menu. These images are in-teractive when you browse over the top, showing the name of the categories under the image depending on the area of interest.

With the help of my dad, we coded the menu bar text to turn blue when a specific page is opened and the length of the drop down menu sits on the same height as the category images.

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PROJECT SENSE

The images in the menu help define what sort of content is dis-played in each page and also makes it far more visual than before. The images for the categories and the posts have a slide roundness to make the corners not so sharp to the eye. In ‘Trade In’, these posts are tagged with key words for quick searches.

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PROJECT SENSE

The ‘Swap Shop’ is still in production and when the event is or-ganised posters will be placed into the sidebar.

The ‘News Feed’ collects all the content together and I’ve used a widget that scrolls pages up.

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PROJECT SENSE

I have also created a few posters that I will send out to schools that create awareness about the project and the swap shop. The choice to have a live website allows me to continue to upload content in the future and use it as a long-term project, eventually running events alongside. It has been interesting working alongside my dad and an events graduate, which has its positives and negatives, as I learnt a lot about time management for myself and from others.

SVR Sense

Documents

Transcript of SVR Sense