Visual Hierarchy - Wk 2 - part 1/3

n this particular assignment, we were asked to create a visual hierarchy for what amounts to a twitter clone. My original thought was to look at what others have done for train-of-thought social sites, but this time around I wanted to hold off on exploration. My goal was to build as much as I could given my inspirations, and then if I got stuck I could poke around on other people's ideas.

The exercise itself was complete within an hour, but it felt wholly incomplete. When I finished this, I couldn't let it go. The name and the tagline was begging for some extra focus. Something about Profound thoughts, 140 characters at a time… The brand Flitter reminded me of flutter and I wanted to make sure the logo was prominent, but didn’t steal focus from the why the user was using the application. It needed to feel ethereal while still showcasing boldness from "Profound thoughts". I figured the if the logo was meant to resemble the user’s thoughts, then the tagline itself was a thought of the logo. I tried two variations of the logo, tagline below (standard) and tagline above. I was surprised how well the tagline above the brand worked!  

Everything got much easier when I anchored myself on the brand logo. This was basically the brand promise and would set the tone for the rest of the user experience. From the logo itself, I created complementary shadows, font weights and styles and grayscale color palette. (We were instructed to avoid mucking with colors and graphics).

WIth the logo complete, I had to change the rest of the layout to make everything more consistent. I figured Saturday night in the amazing city of SF... I should stay home and work on design. So, I spent the next six to eight hours throwing away a ton of design ideas that I thought would make sense until they didn't.

HERE'S WHAT I LEARNED:

• Creating patterns or starting with a general pattern in mind greatly simplifies the rest of the design process.
  
  
• Creating themes and styles saves you a ton of work down the road.
  
• I’d love to learn more about symbols, as that seems like it could have been useful to me. In place of symbols, I created one of my objects as I wanted it, and then created a 1x4 grid to ensure appropriate spacing.  
  
  
• Minimal design (in the spirit of least amount of design needed) is tough. But in the end, simplicity puts focus where focus needs to be, and that makes the experience simpler and more accessible to the user. The page still feels a bit weighty to me... I bet I could remove the containers altogether, and use a simpler anchor.
  
  
• I also came across the question of, this assignment asked for 1 hour of work, and I completely went past that constraint. How do you as a designer know when good is good-enough?