research + planning

1. The Grid
Adam, Elisabeth and Millie

2. Audience Research: Existing Platforms - Instagram
Instagram is a social media platform targeted primarily at a younger
audience as the chart on the left shows. The platform features a range of
content allowing its users to post photos and videos in many different ways
through standard posts to your account, reels, which is Instagram's version
of TikTok, and through stories which they took from snapchat. The app has
changed overtime by adding these features to fit in with popular trends to
keep the apps attraction with their target audience.
Instagram also appeals to their target audience by using simple and clear
icons and a simple layout that makes it super easy to navigate and create
posts. This creates a constant flow of content. It is a super broad platform
allowing users to post about anything you'd like, and the use of hashtags
helps to filter the content to the user's preference.
The logo is simple, yet it represents their platform well as it is arty with the
bright and colourful gradient, and the calligraphy style text. Art can be
anything you want it to be, just like the content users can post.
Overall, the platform gives the user a personalised experience making it
suitable for everyone no matter what their interests are.

3. Audience Research – Existing Platforms
Twitter- Twitter is an American social networking service founded in March of 2006 and is easily one of the most
popular social media apps to this date and is used by millions of people every day especially young teenagers
aged 16-24.
The app has constantly changed since its initial release and has evolved based on how modern media changes so
that it can stay relevant which has worked very well.
Most people that use twitter are on it too general news or to see what's trending.
The app has a bad stigma to cause problems with online arguments and the spreading of misinformation in
recent years the term 'cancelling' has become popular in the way of trying to force a person or celebrity out of
social media if they have been caught or accused of doing something the general public deems inappropriate
even without the need for law enforcement.

4. Audience Research – Existing Platforms
The audience that twitter appeals to is broad as it covers
anyone from young teenagers to over 55-year-olds as it
can be used for lots of different things like audiences
using it for seeing the latest news or some use it to keep
up with friends or celebrities.
This has led the app to develop into a way different
version from where it started in 2006 and it has a strong
voice in things that happen online especially with
businesses and people of power like politicians, actors
and celebrities that use the app.
The colour scheme is kept consistent throughout all its
app and its advertising with this classic light blue colour
usually paired with white borders or text I think the
theme is kept plain so that it appeals to a broad audience
as they wouldn't want to make it either too childish and
flashy but then not too boring so that a lot of ages will
find it pleasing to look at.

5. Audience Research – Twitch
Twitch is a live streaming platform targeted at a younger audience; it is
primarily for gaming content however this isn't the only kind of content
you'll find on twitch.
The logo clearly reflects this target audience as the colours are bold and
vibrant, the contrast creates an appealing and eye-catching brand for
twitch. Its simplistic yet stands out and remains iconic to the twitch brand
identity. The logo itself is a chat box with eyes, it's simple yet connotes a lot
about the platform. The 'blocky' style links directly to the gaming theme the
site has established, the font also follows this theme. Blocky/pixelated styles
have strong connotations/links with video games and an audience will often
perceive such fonts as such.
The logo says a lot about the service twitch provides, the almost 'life-like'
chat box refers to us as the viewer commenting on others streams and
interacting with the service. The eyes give this character to the logo, making
it more fun and intriguing to look at.
All of these aspects of the brands identity have a clear target demographic
in mind and the design choices made are to appeal to this target audience.

6. Audience Research – Twitch
The layout of twitch also matches the target demographic well. The dark site design is sleek and allows for a bolder contrast
with the prominent purple, this contrast leads towards an eye-catching layout. The icons for the main categories "Games",
"IRL" etc. are also designed to appeal to a younger audience. There are drawn icons to accompany each category with an
individual pop of colour for that eye-catching contrast. Also having a category named "IRL" which is short for "in real life"
appeals to a younger demographic who are familiar with the language. This more fun design, which isn't as sophisticated as
other streaming sites, is to appeal to Twitch's target demographic by being more laid back.
Another aspect of Twitch's layout is the suggested/popular categories section, yet again this targets a younger audience
well as it directly shows what is popular and most watched at the moment. Having this section allows for the site users to
browse through each popular category until they find a topic/game most appealing to them.

7. Audience Research – Twitch
This data details the twitch demographic, what age group and
gender mostly use Twitch. From the information provided it's
clear that the predominant audience is 16–24-year-old men. It
is clear

8. Website Research - Instagram
On the Instagram website the bar at the top includes the logo, a search
bar, and a navigation bar which are featured at the top of every page. The
navigation bar includes simple icons that clearly show what page they will
lead to. These are all features that are included on every website. The
posts are shown one at a time on the screen with the username at the
top, the post itself underneath, and the caption with comments showing
at the bottom. Other posts are viewable by simply scrolling on the page.
This layout is pretty common in terms of the placement of each feature.
The Instagram website also includes a recommended section on the right
side of the page which has a list of accounts you may want to follow.
These features all collectively create an easy website that includes
everything you want and need which means we need to consider included
these when designing our own website.

9. Idea Generation
• Gaming, a place to upload and view gaming content
• Travel, a social media platform to post photos and blog about different places
• Sports and fitness, a website with sports related information and fitness guides and tips.
• Social media platform
• Website
• Colourful but simple logo – not much imagery
• Make logo, ident, layout design

10. Audience Research Questionnaire
To discover more about our target audience, we created an audience research questionnaire. All together we gained feedback from 21 people which
consists of 7 females, 12 males, and 2 others. When asked about their age, the majority of people responded with 17 (11 people), next was 18 (7 people),
and the other 3 were over 18. When asked about what they value the most, out of the 10 options we gave, only 7 were chosen. In order of most to least
picked these are Honesty (7 people), Loyalty (4 people), Passion (3 people), Respect (3 people), Enthusiasm (2 responses), Efficiency (1 person),
Reliability (1 person). When asked about their interests, 17 said music, 17 said movies, 15 said gaming, 11 said technology, 9 said food/cooking/baking, 9
said travel/outdoors, 8 said reading, 7 said art/photography, 5 said writing, 5 said politics, 5 said fashion, 5 said sports/fitness, 4 said craft/DIY, and 1 said
beauty/makeup. Finally, when asked which of those they are most passionate about 8 said gaming, 4 said music, 3 said movies, 2 said travel/outdoors,
1 said technology, 1 said fashion, 1 said art/photography, and 1 said sports/fitness.
Overall, the most popular answers we received Honesty, gaming, music, art/photography, and travel.

11. Gender
Looking more in depth at the answers from the survey, some answers
were compared to the gender. As you can discern from the following
graphs, there are specific areas that are more popular than others. For
the most part (as 57% of those who answered were male) the answers
were pretty balanced when considering which gender picked which
answer, however not completely so. I will look into and analyse the
results accordingly to gather information to help form a audience
profile.

12. This graph was made to easily show the percentages and number of what choices people chose on our question are this helped
us to easily see exactly what information we needed like how many people picked one subject. There's was one limitation with
this graph and it's that it didn’t show the gender of the people who chose the subject.
What we found out from this graph is that music, games and fashion are the big three on our list and are more popular than the
rest of the options by quite a few votes.
This shows that people between our age category have a combined liking for these hobbies.
This graph was very useful for finding out the specific interests of our audience.

13. Audience Profile
Key Demographic:
• Ages 16-24
• All genders
• York and local areas
• Full time student or
Key Psychographics:
• Values honesty
• Interested in fine art
and photography
• Likes to travel

14. Research: York
York is a walled city in the northeast of England. It is a city with a historical background which makes it a tourist attraction for
many. York has a lot of things to see and do including:
• York Minster
• Jorvik Viking Centre
• Clifford's Tower
• York City Walls
• The shambles
• York Castle Museum
• National Railway Museum
York also features many shops and places to eat from large main stream brands to smaller self-owned businesses for
everyone to enjoy.

15. Research:
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni
known simply as Michelangelo, was an Italian sculptor,
painter, architect and poet of the High Renaissance born in
the Republic of Florence whose work is some of the most
famous pieces of art and is easily recognizable from his
work.
Some of his most famous work is on the ceiling of the
Sistine chapel which almost anybody can recognize as its
one of the most famous paintings of all time.
His work is the perfect kind of art we would like to be
shared on our platform, so this is the kind of style we
welcome
born: 6 March 1475
Died: 18 February 1564,

16. Research: Aria Shahrokhshahi
Aria Shahrokhshahi is a British-Iranian photographer and filmmaker.
his work is documentary at its core, focusing on a variety
of diverse communities and the way people interact inside
them. Social structures - and more broadly, the human condition –
fascinate Shahrokhshahi, as do the relationships and power dynamics
that inform our existence. Photography offers him a window of
understanding into these communities and a way for him to explore
the world around him.
Aria's work is some of my favorite photographs
and this kind of meaningful media Is what I
would like to see shared on our platform instead
of just basic photos that people haven't put any
heart into.

17. Mood board
In this mood board I've included colours we plan on using and examples
of designs related to grids that I liked the look of plus some examples of
the kind of art that could be shown as our platform is meant for this kind
of content to be shared. There's also some examples of layouts for our
page as its important to have a good looking set up so the images can be
seen with text if needed.

18. Rationale
The reason we are making this product is because we feel there isn't any social media platforms out there that cater
specifically to the audience we are looking at and we would like a much more focused product to share these specific
hobbies and make a creative space to share their artwork or photographs and even places they’ve travelled and would
like to recommend.
Outline of branding concept:
We are creating a social media platform that focuses on photography, art, and travel content. It will be created in a similar
style to Instagram in terms of the layout of the posts. The platform will be a place to share anything travel related in many
forms – photography, art, blogging. The logo will incorporate travel to link to the platforms theme.

19. Logo Ideas
These are all of my logo concepts for
'The Grid'. I tried to take our audience
profile into account when designing
these concepts. I followed the colour
scheme our group picked out, and for
some logos, picked out accent

20. These are the main colours we have chosen to go with for designing
our products. We decided we wanted to keep it a nice neutral colour
pallet with no bright off-putting colours as these nice greens are
calming on the eyes and aren't too distracting from the subject
material.
These colours also go well with our project as it's a lot about travel
which you like to see lots of green grass and trees when you travel in
the nice scenery, so I thought that was a nice little link to have
between the theme and the colours.

21. Ident ideas
For the ident we plan on having an animated map where our texts will pop up in the
streets Assif you were walking down it with the camera. We also want to use the effect of
buildings being 3d almost like a pop-up book I was thinking. This will mostly all have to be
done in aftereffects once we have an idea and layout the design ready to make as I think
it will be best to make a flat map first to base our design off.
I think this could also use some of designs for the logos as inspiration as I like the idea of
having a similar style for all the text and words, we will be using which will give the whole
ident a nice style and keep it cohesive throughout the project

22. Website Layout
For the website layout I chose to create the home page. I placed the logo
at the top in the middle as this will make it visible on all pages and it can
act as an extra home button. To the left of this I placed a search bar,
these are featured on most websites especially social media-based
websites. To the right of the logo, I made a navigation bar which features
clear icons to move you to the home page, video upload page, blog
page, and photo upload page. I added two boxes which represent the
user's feed, this would be from accounts that the user follows, and you
would be able to scroll through these posts. On the right of the page, I
placed a trending box, this would be where the current most popular
trending places are shown and would allow users to click the places and
view all posts to do with the chosen place. Trending sections are
common on social media platforms so I thought this is something we
should include. I included a scroll wheel to show that you would scroll up
and down the page to view more posts.

23. App layouts
For my own little design test, I made two screenshots of what an app could look like for our product as if
they were screen shotted from an iPhone. I used photoshop for both.
I used the colour schemes we had decided on
earlier to make what I thought could be a style
idea for an app I used a similar design to
Instagram as it works well with what we want
to do but morphed it into more the style of our
product.
We used the logo that Millie designed as a nice
middle piece to show off the name of our
product and it fits well with the design.
I even added the top section to make it look
like the screenshot was taken on a phone with
the tie and battery power, so it adds more
detail and realism into the pictures.