“Be not defeated by the rain, Nor let the wind prove your better.” – Kenji Miyazawa
This week started off with a Sketch Roundtable meeting hosted by Felix, one of WTC’s designers. Along with the design team and a few developers, we discussed various tips, struggles and solutions while using Sketch in our workflow. While I haven’t had a chance to use Sketch extensively for the projects during my practicum, I found some of the knowledge and best practices (such as when to turn a recurrent button into a symbol early on in the project) to be very useful and hope to apply them to future projects.
Two main projects of the week were a different iteration for the birthday card project as well as continuing with the WTC re-brand swag concepts.
The first iterations I previously worked on focused on the icons that make up the WTC brand. However, Justin suggested trying a second iteration without using the icons as the main focus and to explore other avenues such as colour, texture etc. He also advised going beyond ‘outside the box.’ In fact, ‘burn the box.’
This time, I decided to limit myself to coming up with sketches focused on the words ‘We the Collective.’ For this approach, I decided to spend some time researching design styles and inspiration I wouldn’t have considered such as brutalist design, experimental typography and interesting texture overlays.
I then took inspiration from my research and sketched very different concepts with the focus on typography. It was a bit surprising but interesting to see how different and ‘freeing’ the ideas from this iteration were compared to the first round, especially since I wasn’t confining myself to utilize a repetitive element.
With next week being my last, I’m looking forward to seeing what’s instore before I’m officially done with practicum!
This week’s quote is from Liam, WTC’s Tech Lead. Although I’ve briefly talked to him during the postcard activity project, I admire how his quote showcases an example of the professionalism one would strive when it comes to the importance of collaboration and communication between designers and developers.
Some of the very best designers I’ve worked with have had a very openminded, collaborative working style. They ask “how can we make this better, together” rather than mandating precisely how something should work and behave. The important part of having a collaborative mindset is understanding that everybody involved has expertise that they can contribute to the betterment of a project, assuming you have all the answers leads to less compelling, less creative, and less successful projects.
– Liam
Slightly Tilted Planet 