So in my last post I shared a run through of my honours year project and outline very briefly the key turning points and aspects of my going through it. But in this post I wanted to focus on the first of two outcomes- a social media app/network that allows, specifically, young creatives to share work with, connect and explore a much wider creative world/community. The second is a poster series about empowering designers to think about their creative process, but that'll be in a separate post!

The main outcome then, the app, was the large focus to my project due to the amount of work and the ideation process that happened within it. But I'm not going to bore you with that entire ideation process in this shortish post, so if you fancy reading it all, check out my honours project blog here.

Anyway, so the app initially was something I was developing as a concept because of the stuff I was doing for #Cbloggers and I wanted to create something that would be a tool for creatives to share their work and connect with other like-minded individuals while also being able to be inspired by the things they see. Through a lot of searching and brainstorming I eventually found a name that fit the whole idea for it which is "Merkai".


In terms of developing the visuals for the app, it was kind of a straight forward process. I knew I wanted aspects of the visuals to be hand drawn while other parts would be obviously vectors. With having the logo hand drawn, it then made sense to have the rest of the text as a standard font, then the icons used throughout as these illustrated assets.



Putting together the app once the visuals was created was simple too. If you hadn't heard about it yet, Adobe brought out a new software called Expierence Design (Xd for short) back at the start of the year which is a more WYSIWYG interface compared to their other software- Dreamweaver. The software was so easy to use and made it possible for people to interact with the design in real time. (You can still do it, play around here: http://adobe.ly/1Slyp8B) 


The last aspect of this project and honestly, I think my favourite part of it, is the promotional material. The idea of the advertising was something I had been trying to brainstorm for a while but it finally came to me one night when I wasn't sleeping which was to go back to the meaning of Meraki. And get people to think about how they do their work and make them become part of the advertising campaign as well!
That's essentially all the aspects to this part of the project then. I had the intentions of just having one final outcome post but I feel it's quite long as it is so I'll make my poster series another post!
In the mean time, you can read a bit more about this project on my website here: http://www.ohhaystudio.com/meraki