Final Design and improvements (Post Crit):

After hearing the feedback other groups and peers gave us, we changed the whole theme of the design as we were informed that the colours were too similar to a hospital's colours, for this reason we changed the scheme to a darker blue and also introduced a bright pink aspect. 

I was very pleased with our final design, and felt it worked very well to accomplish the objective that we set out for it to do. 

The colours were now very unisex and the entire product was bright, eye-catching, ergonomic and most of all, useful.

Improving the design pre-crit:

We decided to further improve the design in an attempt to make it more eye catching, appealing and also fit for purpose. 

 

At this moment in time, we were very pleased with our design and felt it was doing a very good job of demonstrating the most efficient route to LCA to a Fresher.

As we had spent a while as a group designing the piece, we felt we needed outside opinions about how it could be improved. 

Street view style photographs

I was still committed to taking the photographs for our map, and with Taylor we did the journey from LP - LCA, writing down the road names and taking photographs of the route.

 

After capturing many images of the route, I had to condense the selection down to eight vital pictures which (in theory) could demonstrate the route without the map's aid. 

Print run through - Prototype:

We decided to print the design that we had so far to see how things were going and to get a different perspective rather than viewing the design only on screen.

The design was coming along very successfully, and the function and mechanisms were working how we envisaged.
The folds were planned out on illustrator and it was a case of trial and error for them to match up correctly.

The map folded out into two halves which then joined together to form a full A5 sized map.
We created a QR code which was fully functioning.

We put the printed design into a wallet to see how it would function, and if the business card sized piece was effective, we believed it was. 

At this stage we were ready for a critique of our work to see how it could be improved. 

Working on the product: design development/style

We all had ideas as a group of how it would look, and we all have varying ideas of what we find aesthetically pleasing and not, therefore our design would involve a lot of compromise and group collaboration.

Design ideas:

As the QR code was something we were very passionate about at this stage, we thought it'd be best to involve it as much as possible, and for that reason we replaced the tittle in the question mark of "Lost?" to the space where the QR could would be positioned.

We delved deeper into maps' keys and how the symbols look on a professional map and considered using those on our map.  

Working on the product: Creating our own map

Below is the map of Liberty Park to LCA, the yellow line represents the desired route to LCA and the numbered dots will work in conjunction with street view style photos which should guide the way. 

This is a very early creation, so the tone and colours of the map haven't been considered at this stage. It is something we will look into further at a later stage. 

Initial ideas: Business card sized design

Business Card sizes:

As the size of a business card has very limited space for information, and the faces of the card amount to only around 90cm², we decided to create a business card that folded out into a larger map type creation. 

A prototype of the stock resulted in the business card folding out into a piece of paper that was the size of 18 faces of the business card, meaning there was much more room than there was previously. 

I had the idea that if the map folded into 4 business card sized pieces and the top two and bottom two folded to meet and that would be where the map would be located on the page. 

We planned out the sections using illustrator so that when the map was printed the folds would make it legible and the front of the card would be in the correct place.