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Tiven: Creative Arts
Bringing a more friendly introduction into creative interactions and spaces, digitally to enhance and promote physical events and communities, focusing on smaller communities and more rural settings.
Creating an events and community space centred around creative arts, via Tiven - a compartmentalised brand, focused around 3 areas:
An Events app,
A Community Board app,
An Academic space / Research space website.
F. Buchanan et al, mentioned in their article regarding web-based Fine Art information, that there is only a little amount of Fine Art information gathered in one location, if you wanted to find out about one individual artist, it is required to actively search through different websites and locations to gather this information. (Buchanan et al, 2015)
While this was a few years ago, it still is a very present issue online. There are so many small sites that host different information, and I can understand if it can be intimidating to enter these creative spaces as it creates a barrier of access due to the proactive nature of finding all the different sites, resources, and events. The naming of the industry does not help assist with this confused of trying to find a location that has a collated space of information.
For events/exhibitions there websites such as:
Art News, Art Rabbit, Art Fund, ArtPass, Eventbrite, Wild in Art, Artpiq, Curatorspace
News can be from websites such as:
A-N, Art News, Artsy, Art & design section in the guardian, ArtPass
Finding events isn't just about knowing local galleries either, as Fine Art in particular has been investigating more anti-institutionalised artwork, with public work and investigating art practice outside of the traditional gallery space. While there is the notion of the uninformed guest as a viewer of the work, there should still be an option for people who are interested in the public to be able to find what creative work is occuring locally. To be able to find events and local communities easily and for their to be this method to enter into the arts from a digital perspective.
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Unfortunately I was not able to talk to UK New Artists about the access of the arts for both artists and the public, as I had no response to this email after contacting them again after waiting until after their event finished.
Competitor Sites and Apps
why an app?
The reason why I decided this would be appropriate as an app, as while there are currently an oversaturation of information online through websites, other than: ArtRabbit with +15,000 downloads and negative reviews on UX of the app, Eventbrite only showcasing organisations that currently have events up, and can't really be used for ongoing exhibitions and long term events, such as open calls and competitions.
An app will also be more beneficial as it can be a more casual and familiar way for people to find out more about events and arts activities around them
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digitally and physically. With an app it will be easier to share information and links for events, because of the clipboard function.
With this in mind, the very first concept was a redesigning of the ArtRabbit app, and focusing heavily on events, above there is a rough version of the "Design hierarchy of needs", with a basic used flow on the left of how someone might navigate. I decided to pause on any drawings however, as I wanted at this point to make sure I understand the scope of the project.
Survey
I created an anonymous survey that focused around creative industries, experience around finding events and arts news, and what areas would they be personally interested in.
In the survey I also asked about what Social Media they used specifically for connecting with the arts, and their experiences with competitor sites to see how many people from my sample had any feedback on the competitors.
It is also worth noting that this survey does have validity issues, as the majority of people contacted had a pre-established interested in art, and while the survey itself did not include age range, a large majority of people contacted for the survey were young adults.
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Above is a summary of the results from the survey, during the earlier development of this project, I had planned to prioritise 4 areas within the app:
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Community,
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promote positive interpersonal connections in creative industries
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Competitions,
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Showcase skills and challenge yourself, think creatively.
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Events,
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Exhibitions, talks, workshops.
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Portfolio
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Showcase creative works.
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Process of designing the academic poster of project
While designing the poster, there was a change from linework abstract to a more minimal and friendlier appearance of curved boxes, gradients, and shadows, as opposed to the sharp black lines. This is because while working on this project the visuals and styling of the app, and contents had changed and while the general format was the same, it created this shift in design style on the poster.
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User flow concept of app
Beginning concept of the user flow of the app, I quite liked the idea of having a colour coded scheme for the different types of areas, the example given being 'events, online, opportunity'. I had also considered the idea of communities having personal codes so that it would be easier to search if you know the organisation already. E.g. University of Winchester, Digital Media Design: 'W-DMD'
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These original pages would have explained the art terms used for the tagging system, to assist with people who may not be familiar to the arts. Unfortunately, the design was not adequate at all. This is because it would have been too much information and visuals if they opened the page to see a art terms overtop images. Another glaring issue with this design is that the art genres had a large overlap between the different terms.
One of the concepts I had while working on the creation of the search terms and organisation was a process when creating a new account. This meant that the search could be refined by the account itself and minor changes could be modified later. However, when I designed this concept, I realised that the process was very tedious and became confusing on your placement when going back to change a category. This can be seen in the above video of the prototype test.
One of the main issues was the fact that you visibly couldn't see what stage you were at or what your progress to the app itself is, you could be one page away or three. One way this can be solved is to have a visual indicator of how many steps there are or have the process simplified down to key areas that are clickable on the screen before popping up with the categories you can click on, speeding up the process and getting to areas the user wants to change in particular. For example, adding a category like 'Animation and Motion' as an interest you should be able to click on the small icon and not go through the entire process again to go to the start of the refining process.
This adjustment to the search can be seen in the above video at [1:15], in addition a basic navigation of the app can be seen in this prototype. I was considering the creative access app to have a polygon style and linework, this can be seen as well in my Pinterest mood board I set up during this stage of the project for inspiration.
Sampling a few images from the Pinterest board for the accessing arts project, I made sure to choose my main inspirations of typography styles, from the geometric focused alphabetic images on the board. From this sample I looked at the Adobe Font suggested styles and fonts. During this stage I decided to go with 'Aviano Future' as my font choice as the linework seemed to match the current style. The 'B' especially seemed to reflect the logo created.
My font testing document I used to compare font styles and selecting a design is in the file below. When selecting a font from the suggested fonts, I didn't like the thicker fonts, as I was concerned how they would look smaller scale for phones, and the linework of the logo and the linework to accent on the app meant I was more drawn towards the thin straight line fonts and 'Aviano Future'.
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From the last group critique, I presented this prototype for feedback. The main critique were that:
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The decorative style created confusion on what was clickable.
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Legibility and inconsistency issues
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Confusing navigation due to too many things within the app.
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Simplification and minimalism would be needed.
I agreed with this feedback and decided to take inspiration from Fine Art, and consider the font usage for signage in exhibition space to be legible without distracting from the artwork itself.
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A concept of how the brand could break down the 3 areas into manageable components/ products.
However, CreBoa was originally for the 'Creative Board' and as such it doesn't represent the brand with this new concept. As a result I will have to change the brand and logo to encapsulate the whole brand, with icons to represent each individual product.
Signage inspiration font style, and using adobe fonts to try and replicate style. Finally I came across 'Neue Haas Grostesk' and that was the font style I decided to use for the text as it had a lot of different font weights and replicated that signage style I had been focusing on.
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Some Icons I created as there wasn't high quality downloadable pack that I could successfully download. I wanted to focus the icons around minimalist design however they are thicker than I had intended, progressing forward these would have been thinned.
Kerning needed to be adjusted in between V,E and E,N.
Title: Century Gothic [Italic]
Subtitle: Neue Haas Grotesk Display Pro [25 Thin]
All capital letters seems to be less friendly and harsher.
The design process of the Tiven logo was fairly short as the name itself took a while, there was a large variation of choices from Milic, Visure, Avancy, Peerce. were considered. My main motivation of words were 'Creativity' 'Open' and the idea of keeping the ball rolling and the perpetual by bouncing off of other creative people, without it being seen as only collaboration. After a long time I came across the idea of 'Tiven' after focusing on the main two words previously.
I used the 'Cre' for CreBoa previously but never considered the rest of the word. 'Tivity' reminded me of Nativity, however, I broke that down to 'Tiv', and added the end of Open to that which resulted in the final name.
I had considered Tivan as well, however it felt more difficult to remember, as I kept thinking, and reading it as, "Tivian" and thus not being able to remember that variation of the spelling very well.
Events
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Community Board
Follow organisations, interacting centric, can see linked organisations that are listing events on the other app [community only or public] Networking tool between creatives, QR code system to improve physical connections:
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Connect others to your profile
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Instant link for community/organisation/Creative for another user to scan
Social App
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Self reflective Evaluation
I really like the space given to allow the areas of Tiven to breathe and not overlap or be too heavy on a singular app as a whole, the modulisation broke things down into manageable areas. The clear colour identification to divide the areas to create multiple areas that can be beneficial. However the final concept itself is rather basic and could have been improved by adding a process of opening an event for more details or viewing your calendar. While I am mostly happy with the layout of the concept, the description of the events do make the cards more busy and cluttered. The icons themselves needed to be more uniform and thinner to keep consistency.
While I am proud of the scope researched through the survey and meetings, however I definitely tried to handle too much as I kept altering and remaking the prototype. I also wasted a lot of time that could have been more proactive by trying to figure out the name for the modulated version. Similar to 'Attain' my main largest flaw is on project scale and time management to make sure the final product is of quality, in addition
Progressing forward I need to make sure that I have only a singular goal in mind and that I try and meet that to a professional standard, with suggestions of how other areas could be taken further without trying to do that myself during the project.
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