To continue my development, the visual language board I created allowed me to zone in on typefaces and colour themes. This is an essential part of branding as it gives the whole product an identity and a reoccurring template so that the whole app and any spin offs (a physical product) can be identified as one group/product.
Afterwards, I concentrated on the process of how an individual could go from taking a photo, all the way through to getting a following and funding to make the idea a possibility. I researched into various visual editors or 3D construction tools (like google SketchUp), however through my own experience, I found that it requires many hours to build up skills to illustrate something clearly. Upon briefly moving onto creating my app home screen, I came across the parallax effect which creates depth and through that as a simple method, anybody would be able to highlight what the different layers in their image were (closer and further away). Therefore, individuals could place down their drawing, put it behind objects to create depth, rotate, resize, skew and other tools to make their drawing or premade object into their photo of an area.
To offer further support, I created an area of the app where the user could research laws and receive help from local, or worldwide professionals willing to lend their help for free. This is essential as it is a daunting part of a process that scares away many people as it is too much work and sometimes hard to understand. When working with land this is crucial because of different laws laid out to protect areas etc.
Finally, the app had to be attractive to people who wanted to support people and projects even if they didn’t own one of their own. I conducted a small bit of research into how people prefer to find things in their area and google maps helped as it showed distance and gave a strong idea of how many things were in an area. I took this and thought people could discover pins on a map that had a key, indicating what each area represented: park, campsite etc.
For profiles, I took from many other social media formats and had the individuals profile picture and a small description about themselves as well as having a follower count. The ability to get followers could encourage people to get their name out there if they work on a lot of projects that could show a display of their skill as well as the positive effects that they have worked for a charitable project. As well as this, ‘money raised’ and the ‘number of projects’ they’ve carried out are good clear indicators as to what they have achieved on the app.
