postpics
Post Pics was my Independent Studio Project, which completed my Masters course in Product Design. The project brings together my passions for photography, design and exploration, and was a creative challenge for me to build upon my graphic design, branding, user interface and user experience design skills.
In short: It's a social photo sharing app which supports people with mobile photography and social media. It does so by building an online community of budding photographers, who can create and share a portfolio of work on the app and other social media platforms, to help build their online presence. Simultaneously, the users continuously learn and improve their photography skills, and get to explore their real life surroundings.
the app
Users can build their folios by taking part in challenges, playful tasks and collaborations facilitated by the app, which will utilise the application features to help them improve their photography skills. The challenges are the core of the app, with dedicated pages to show off the ones people have been completing and options to show off your own too. The idea is for users to then share these photos far and wide on Instagram, Snapchat, etc. to both promote photography throughout the city and to promote this app, showing anybody how easily they can learn to take the same photos themselves.
Taking part in the tasks provided will also help build a photographic archive of Dundee within this app itself, for people to freely explore through maps, helping uncover the city from every angle. It's about having a simple user interface, putting the photos front and centre and ensuring users still pay attention to the real world around them.
Going back to the beginning; when ideating concepts at the start of this project,
I took inspiration from existing and successful social media photography apps, doing some first hand research on how they’re designed. I aimed to create an interface which people are used to, putting photos and profiles at the forefront. Once I played around with basic wireframes on XD (below), I was then able to be more creative with my imagination, to visualise how I could make my app unique. In-between this first prototype and the next, I did a lot of pencil sketches of layouts, shapes and buttons before I then started a fresh prototype.
Prototyping
Taking inspiration from my pencil sketches, I built a wireframe of the content I wanted to see on the app. On the home feed it would be photos at the forefront, with the name of the poster and caption secondary. On profiles, I didn't want to clog half of the page with user information, bio's etc, because having the screen almost full of everyone's photos straight away was more important to me - to trigger immediate reactions to their photography when you open their page. When individual photos are opened, I wanted as much focus on the story as I did on the photo at this stage, so immediately went with the idea of having a 'bubble' of text below, making it a stand out design feature of the app.
layout and shapes
After creating the most prominent screens for the app, I filled them with content and then started to play with shapes and positions. The final design I chose for these screens followed a considered decision of having three tiers beneath each photo: the user > the description > the action. This order seemed more natural to me; especially when I observed people testing the app out. The purpose of the app was to encourage people to get involved, not just to scroll.
I continued to add extra screens, continuously refining the design decisions I was making along the way and iterating the buttons and interactive elements. One of which that mattered most to me was the colour: blue. First and foremost, blue represents communication and promotes interaction. This is precisely what Post Pics is all about! That's why I made the colour such a dominating feature in the design of the app.
I chose two tones for the logo; the darker tone for interaction (Post) and lighter tone for communication (Pics). Within the app I also used the two tones, the darker for the home segment of the app because this is where users will initially interact with other photos. Then I used the lighter tone for the 'challenges' section of the app because that's where they will communicate with each other through the photography challenges.
