• What Did You Learn?

The main thing I learned how to do animations in Figma as well as improving my prototyping skills. Learning how to use certain animations was very helpful as it saved steps that other wise would have taken longer. In addition to the animations I felt as with more time in Figma I managed to improve my prototyping skills. As a result I feel I was able to take my skills up a notch compared to the first project.

• What Was Easy?

It was easy coming up with the app concept I wanted. I am a huge sports fan in general and I feel with all the apps out there this one simplifies everything.

• What Was Challenging

The hardest thing for me in this project was surprisingly the color scheme. With so many teams using different colors I wanted to make sure I had a theme that worked well with that. As a result I kept it simple with black, silver and white. But this also felt to bland on it’s own so I added the teams colors on their corresponding pages. It was also challenging to find sources I liked because I wanted to use other sites for content and not just main stream articles.

• How Could Your Submission be Improved?

I think my submission could be improved if I had more time. I probably spent to much time doing the team webpages and in turn wasn’t able to spend more time on the chat screen (a key feature of my app). Overall however I think everything came out great including the layout coming out in a very clean way.

1.) Urban City (Complementary)

For this design I really wanted t make the city seem as dense as possible. Because of this I added different gradients on the buildings and made them darker as we got farther back. To me this made it seem like the skyscrapers just kept coming and coming. I knew I wanted to do the city at night so I chose blue as my primary color. For the night sky I used a liner gradient. As you get closer to the city the gradient lightens up as the city presumably would be giving off it’s own light. And finally I used the Figure/Ground principle for the moon and stars. This in turn created contrasts between the stars and moon compared to the rest of the sky/buildings in the background. To do this I made the moon and stars orange which ultimately gave us a complementary color scheme.

2.) Seascape (Split-Complementary)

To me this was the hardest of the four landscapes to complete. This was due to the fact that I wanted to use blue and green but ultimately could not as I already used a color scheme (Analogous) that would truly allow me to use this. With that said however, I actually think it ended up coming out very nice. To begin I added the coral, star fish and sand dollars. I made the coral and sand dollars in the back a darker shade. This was an attempt to try and add depth to the piece. I also added fish to make the piece feel alive and full of life. With the use of my vibrant colors this helps as well. With all this as well I wanted to add a gradient to the background. I wanted this to be in the corner and come down in a diagonal fashion as light reflects against water differently. And finally To add less dead space, I added various bubbles of different sizes to the piece.

3.) Arid Desert (Analogous)

This was the landscape that was the most fun for me to accomplish. For this design I really wanted to highlight the pyramids that I created. I feel this piece has the most depth and this was accomplished with the use of gradients. Particularly in the sand, or more noticeably, in the pyramids themselves. The pyramid in front is lighter than the one in the back which contributes to the depth of the piece immensely. I used an analogous color scheme as I really wanted the piece to look dead and dull. I think I accomplished this as the only bit of real color in my eyes comes from the red sky. In addition to the red sky I added a sun which has a mask over it creating a really nice effect. I also used the Figure/Ground principle in this particular landscape, which can be seen with the pyramids.

4.) Outer Space (Triadic)

For this piece I wanted to have fun and use vibrant colors. This is because up to this point, my landscapes featured either a lot of dark blue (urban city, seascape) or bland dry colors (arid desert). Because of this I used a triadic color scheme of very saturated green purple and orange, and set out to make a colorful landscape in an environment not known for bright color. I feel this really came out nice and the planets really did pop against the dark eggplant background. I also added a ton of stars in the background to help add more to the piece and not just be a dark background. If you look closely as well I also broke the stars up by adding a couple in a different color that looks like the big dipper.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really like how this project came out. Each piece stands out on their own but if combined they all look like they fit into a cartoony style, something I originally didn’t prepare for. I also learned how changing the colors of an object ever so slightly can have a huge effect on the piece. Finally I realized how important gradients are. I had never really used them before and with out them I feel my pieces would look incredibly flat and one dimensional.

For project 2 we were tasked with creating composite images from our project 1 imagery. In My case here I used Vader as my center piece and after that continued with the villain theme. I used different blending techniques to make it seem like one cohesive image the primary ones being, color dodge and linear dodge. I used Darken on the two figures in the corner as I tried to give the image more depth. The most challenging part of this lab for me picking certain images as I loved all my pictures from project 1. This lab I also heavily used the stamp tool to get rid of certain things such as speech bubbles.