Chosen Visual Style

After doing my presentation I was at the time unsure of what I wanted to do when it came to the visual style. Even though I had a lot of ideas and concepts I didn't know what do go for. At the time I was more leaning towards illustrated designed visual style, so something that i purely came up with and designed. 

The benefits of having a designed iBook for a topic like this, is that it would make the iBook different from all the iBooks with similar topics. It would also give a potential cool design style and layout and would be quite distinctive and unique and visually look more appealing than most iBook's which seem to put no effort to the visual style and layout.

At the time when i red the brief when it mentioned 'visual style' i instantly thought of as something we have to create of deisgn a visual style for this iBook, however I was wrong. After discussing this with my teacher he mentioned thee visual style doesn't have to be something we create from the ground up and it could be just images or edited real images for the visual style of the iBook. After hearing this it made me reconsider what to do, however I was still kind of interested in creating a visual style myself through the use of simple flat imagery and colours in order to make it simple but effective.

After doing my presentation I looked back at my mock up designs, I decided to go for a simple design with the use of the silhouette of the buildings and the mixture of reds/blacks/dark greys/whites. i.e. the 'danger' visual style i came up with. This style was originally based of a couple of assets from the 'DROP', 'COVER' 'HOLD ON' keynote interaction in illustrator i made. When i looked at the style of it i thought that potentially it could work as a visual style in itself and thought i could incorporate many other ideas into it, i.e. the skyline idea, ground idea etc but all combined into one visual style.

Fig 1: Keynote interaction concept

Fig 3/ Fig 4 - Visual style concept

Fig 5/ Fig 6 - Visual style concept 

Fig 7/ Fig 8 - Visual style concept - Layout

Above are a few concepts of layout some of these were shown off in my presentation. As you can see a lot of the layout is quite different and so is the imagery as well, (not all of them will be content pages). Some of these ideas are just simple concept ideas so these aren't all final designs of pages, they are more examples, to give you an idea of the visual style. The one thing I want to do with this visual style is to give a sense of danger and urgency and i feel like this colour scheme and use of border gives a sense of a compact and dangerous environment which is what I want as my topic is about earthquakes after all. 

I feel like this idea is different from a lot of iBooks relating to earthquakes and I feel like the style works well with the topic of earthquakes along with the imagery and colours. I want the user to admire the iBook i create, not only for the content which is useful but the design and visual style of the iBook along with the interactions embedded within the iBook, in order to give them the best user experience all round.

Fig 9 - Main colour choices 

Above is the main colours i shall be using, and as you can see most of them are different  shades of reds and and dark greys and blacks and whites. These colours do work well together and i feel give the sense of danger. The use of red has many connotations behind it, and one of them being danger and black also has connotations to death and these both are related to earthquakes in a sense as they are dangerous and can lead to mass destruction and deaths as well as many ripple effects which can lead to more deaths and damage to its environment.

Once I decided on this style, because the imagery and style was based around being flat with simple colours, I then decided to do more research into Flat UI and Flat Imagery within logo's etc.