Rough and Ready - Sketches and Idea generation by Samuel Barran

I’m Rough, You Ready?

Rough and Ready contains my conception processes showing the earliest forms of my idea, logo & layout development. The front cover features my notepad (Stickers from @killeracid), where my idea was first conceived and planned out. I don’t use my notepad often, I prefer to use software to create rough layouts as I find I’m more effective at being creative when I’m using them. But there have been instances where I’ve sketched out my layout design which always helps me when I’m reproducing them on Illustrator/Indesign. While I don’t sketch very often I understand it’s usefulness within the design process and have been trying to improve my abilities so that if I need to map out a layout or logo I can do so quickly and on the go.

Initial Ideas and Conceptualisation

When we started the year I started to think about what I could potentially create. I started with four rough ideas; Validate, creating transformative fonts, improving the popularity of competitive table tennis or something to do with origami. I decided to pursue Validate as I felt it was more of a well formed concept and an idea the community desperately need. I started to think about what services I could offer with the site, trying to understand how it would work and where I could potentially go with it. I thought about what I could do to incentivize industry/ experts to critique work and how that would intertwine with the rest of the websites functions. I also looked at the positives both target audiences could get from using the site. This was the roughest form of my concept and where it all began.

Crit-me Logo Concept

I struggled to figure out the name of my concept for quite a while. After thinking about a few different titles, I settled on Crit-me. The name is a command to industry/experts attempting to make them to take action. It can also apply to an amateur whoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s looking for critiques and opinions on their work. The aim of the website is also very clear and the logo makes the concept easy to deliver and understand. I created some basic concepts but felt I was creating a really obvious and plain logo. Visualising critiques as written feedback was the complete opposite of what I wanted to achieve with the site so I started looking at Emoji and conveying emotion and feeling using icons. I also didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want my text to be static so using circles to create the curves and the 3D Extrude and Bevel tool to give the logo depth I was able to create text I was really happy with (see lots & lots of screenshots as I explain this process in more detail.)

Website Layout Concept

The largest part of the project was creating the layout for my website. I was intially quite daunted to start this section of work so creating some layout options in Illustrator really helped me plan how it was going to look and how I was going to code it later. I attempted to sketch them out but I felt it wasn’t working as I wasn’t able to get a sense of how it would look on the screen so it was natural that I would use Illustrator for this process. I normally don’t create layouts as I like to get stuck in and experiment on the way but they were actually extremely useful when it came to designing the final website concept. I ended up getting rid of a section to replace it with another so having the layouts there I could test out how that would look without worry of messing up my final website concepts.

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Website Login Layout Concepts

My initial thought with the login page was to have a clear divide between the two roles on the site to represent the split between professionals and amateurs. I played around with how I could divide the page and where the information could go to create unique layouts that I could potentially use when designing the site.

Final Rough For Login Page

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