torsdag 26 september 2013

The Hipster's Guide to Italian Coffee, intro

For a while now I've wanted to develop a digital guide to Italian coffee (one of my big life passions). I've had the silly word-play title "The Hipster's Guide to the Galaxy" kicking around for a while, and decided that the Italian coffee application could fit under that umbrella.

Real concept development of this idea started last Friday, when I was sketching ideas for how to navigate through all the different types of coffee, and considering the hierarchical structure. Based on experience I gathered during my thesis project (here), I wanted to encourage a exploratory navigation through the application, and probably a flat hierarchical structure.

I realize that this is not a new app-concept, and have already checked out a few of the ones that are available on Google Play. However, those are often pretty utilitarian in their looks, and at least a few of them seem to be aimed more at the home espresso machine owner, than my target group: the trend-sensitive hipster that wants to stump the local super-smug, fixie-riding, arm-tattooed barista.

This left me deciding to go with a side-menu navigation, with a list of the different types of coffee. Since I want the app to be a bit eye-catching, rather than utilitarian, I decided to test out a few different graphical styles. I played around with different illustrations as well, but couldn't really find the tone. In the end I found this inspiring poster on visual.ly called Exceptional Expressions of Espresso, by the Pop Chart Lab, and decided to incorporate that into my prototype, just for mock-up purposes. The idea is to replicate a similar kind of visual language going forward, but with illustrations that are a bit more flat (and of course non-copyright infringing).

Final result after almost two days of work can be seen below:





TODO:
- user test on someone (urgently), something that's difficult when you're home alone developing
- add a bunch of more variations of coffee, and also expand the descriptions
- replace all the "borrowed" material from the coffee poster with my own beautiful Inkscape-products

PS. If you have the IP rights of the poster, and you don't want it featured on this site, drop me a line and I'll remove the images.

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