Finally, I turned my attention to the app. Although Leah had officially master-minded the layout, Nat and I had helped with the overall design and now it was my job to create two pages for the app to add to this.

First of all, I looked at more research. We had researched apps together ourselves at the beginning of the brief but I wanted to look more in depth at the type of app that we were trying to create, at something educational that would work for the age group we were aiming at.

These were the top three that I felt matched our content the most. The first app in particular I really enjoy, because I feel like it is incredibly similar to our own and that we could draw from this into our designs. I also really liked the last app because it feels a lot more organic and easy to use, in that you can use your finger and thumb to travel round space and click on all the different planets. However, although the second app does match our content, I find it quite boring, although I do like the placement of the videos in a jigsaw.

 

After receiving feedback from my peers and teacher about the overall design of our website, including drafts, I decided to compare our website to other children’s websites on space. This was quite difficult because as we had seen before a lot of the websites were actually games, not educational, and so it was hard to find something that would exactly match what we were trying to create. However, I did manage to find a couple of websites that were similar to ours in the sense that they were also clearly fact-based.

These are what I have found. I feel like our design does match up quite well with these websites, and perhaps even looks better in some aspects. For example, these websites to me feel a little boring, because there is a lot of text and not enough graphics or bright colours to simulate children and to invite them to use them. Although ‘Planets for Kids’ does use more images than StarDate, I feel like these images are a little dull because they seem just to be copied and pasted from another source. This is one of the reasons why we decided to actually hand-made our graphics. Overall, I don’t feel like these websites do that good of a job in comparison to our website, which I feel is a lot more fun.

After receiving feedback from my peers and teacher, I looked again at creating the website pages by taking their criticisms and praise into mind. From this, this is my final draft for the Jupiter website.

I decided to tone down the opacity of the ‘spider’s legs’ coming out of Jupiter’s body and also added several long yellow lines to forgo this illusion. We also decided to change the stars to something smaller and more faded to give the illusion of them glowing, which would help with the child-like theme of the product. We also got rid of the arrows as this made the website not look as fun and seemed more boring.

There isn’t much that I changed for Uranus’ design because I did like the original design itself. Again, I edited the stars to make them smaller and to make them glow. I also changed the blue shapes behind Uranus by making them a deeper blue, and also by expanding them further than originally. The reason why I did this is because I think it looks neater and also gives the illusion that Uranus itself is glowing.

We did have some thoughts on what would happen if the website would be created. I liked the idea of when the cursor passes over the stars they move and chime, like wind-chimes, and swing on their string. I also liked the idea of when you hovered over Uranus or Jupiter or a planet it blinked and smiled and perhaps made a ‘ooh’ noise. It would also be possible to zoom into the text if it was difficult to read by double clicking on it. I also liked the idea that if you passed over the blue shapes at the back of Uranus they glowed, and if you passed over the yellow lines coming out of Jupiter they wiggled. The reason why I thought about this is because I think it would make the website a lot more fun for children whilst also being educational.

After completing my posters, it was time to move on to creating my own two pages for the website. We had worked together to create the designs ourselves as a group. This was my attempt at a website page for Jupiter.

I quite like this design, because I like the layout of, especially the bar at the top of the screen as it feel like it looks professional. The use of the stars I also quite like because it gives that child-like feeling that Little Big Planet brought. However, the poster does still look too cramped and from the feedback given in our presentation today, the boxes coming away from Jupiter itself do look almost like spiders’ legs. This will be something I need to fix in the later editions.

This was also my attempt at a website page for Uranus.

Again, I like the overall layout of the website. This page also looks less cramped. I had decided to include some background detail such as the blue circles around Uranus itself to make it look more fun. However, I would edit these slightly because they are covering Uranus’ eyes and this doesn’t look as professional if they had been behind the actual planet itself.

This is my final attempt at the infographic for the brief. I decided to space out the text and graphics so as not to make it looked cramped like the other attempts. I found hand-drawn vectors and coloured them to make the alien and the spaceship look more effective as a children’s educational poster. I also followed the theme in the Star Wars poster and included dark arrows in blue to highlight where the children would need to read to and from. I do like this design, but if I had more time and more patience perhaps, I would have aimed to make the poster look a bit more exciting, such as making the text appear in different angles.