Visual Progression

I had a direction, rationale and theme sorted out, I just needed to produce the assets. I took to Photoshop with the ideas sketched out in my sketchbook and then wanted to try to create what I saw in my head. There was an issue however,. In my sketchbook I had a low down, front on view of each player that was popular in the era everything from the gramophone to an iPod. Being a student trying to get assets and imagery for free and not having the resources or means to access an early 1870's gramophone I came across problems trying to acquire images that met up to the expectations I had from my sketches. After trying to make them work I was forced to abandon the idea. I managed to friend images I thought were well composed and appealing and tried to do what I could with them. This is the original menu system that I thought I would go with:

I did like this idea and felt as though it worked as a design. However I felt as though it didn't really adhere to the overall theme I felt was important. I really liked the instruction manual feel and I felt it justified adding colour as I mentioned in the previous post. It was a printing technique rather than just a photograph. Also this style doesn't really evoke the same time properties and chronological themes I felt were important. IT does show musical evolution and the colouring/picture quality does loosely allude to the time periods mentioned however, I felt as though I could do better.

With that in mind I went back to Photoshop with the goal of creating a menu system that linked a lot closer to the home screen. I thought that this would help to tie the app together as a whole and add an overall theme and tone. I also much preferred how the home screen looked to a more photographic and modern style I feel exudes from the above image. This is what I ended up creating:

I think that this works far better than the image above. It links to the home screen much more clearly and effectively, It looks nicer I think and it has a more defined difference between the era's selectable by having such vastly different colours. From this I then quickly came up with a loading screen idea:

I will add an ellipses in After Effects that will animate. This again ties into the menu screen and the home screen and allows the app as a whole to have a consistent solid theme and tone. The colour is contextual with the era selected as is the image at the bottom.

So that is the reasoning between the apps look and feel and why I strayed from the original idea. I will go over the decisions behind the player in the next post.