trnup for what? designing a mobile app

Project Background

Recently I had the opportunity to work with Matt Tidwell, the president of ThinkThru, Inc., to help him get some of his ideas for an app further down the line towards reality – something the public may be able to use.

I can’t say much about the app’s function itself, but I can show you some of the images I made for this project.

The app is called trnup. The motto for the app, which is about as far as I can go in describing the app’s function, is “Crowdsourcing the Party.”

First, Matt and I met and discussed some rough ideas for the app. We talked about what the function of the app would be, and Matt provided me with some use cases to illustrate the app’s functionality. My work for this project fell into three areas:

  1. Logo Design
  2. App Design
  3. Presentation of App Design for Potential Investors

Let’s look at each of these areas in more detail.

Logo Design

I worked with Matt to design the logo for trnup over several iterations.

LOGO DESIGN ITERATION #1

First Logo

This was the first iteration. I asked him to look through the designs and see if he liked them. I was thinking of purple and green because, being from the South and having spent a great deal of time in Mobile, Alabama, and New Orleans, Louisiana, the “party” aspect of the app made me think of Mardi Gras. I think what led me to that purple, more than anything else, was the name itself. When you say “turn up” quickly, it sounds a lot like “turnip.”

But Matt was ambivalent about the colors. He did, however, say that he liked option 2A and 5. He then showed me some other designs on web pages he had become acquainted with since we started on this and asked me to consider those for the next iteration.

LOGO DESIGN ITERATION #2

When I showed him this set, he loved option 3B. We moved forward with that.

LOGO DESIGN ITERATION #3

We still hadn’t picked out colors yet, so I, still fond of the purple, decided to mix things up and keep the purple, but add a yellow to it. This made me think of another use of the word turn up, which is very close to what people mean when they get “turnt”. So I added some bubbles of wine and added the phrase, “turn up your life, turn up for the party” along the bottom.

He loved the logo, but, again, was not fond of the colors. We killed the wine bubbles aspect of it outright.

LOGO DESIGN ITERATION #4

I fooled around with some other ideas, playing with them even as I knew we were coming to something I knew we would both like. I showed Matt this to get his thoughts. He really like the third option, but didn’t want any of the dials shown as they were.

Which brought us to this.

Which I tweaked one more time, adding a little knob, or dial, using the negative space within the letter p’s counter.

When Matt told me he loved this, we had our final logo. We also had our core colors. To confirm, I put this together.

APP DESIGN

Using the font and color choices we had made to date, I put this interface layout together. It would provide most of the components that we would use for the interface design.

From there I added user experience elements based on items from the use cases that Matt had provided me. Again, I can’t show you all we put together, but these are the ones I can.

PRESENTATION

From there I crafted a .pdf presentation. The goal was to be able to use this presentation as a kind of PowerPoint that could be shown on any device (from elevator pitch with a cell phone to a board room meeting with potential investors). We also wanted to print copies of the presentation that investors would be able to review at their leisure.

You can view the presentation formatted for this portfolio below. Use the up and down arrows on the bottom left of the pdf viewing area to navigate the presentation.

In order to show my work on this at this time, I had to blur out a lot of the images and descriptions (and put in a bit of placeholder text). Even then my work speaks for itself.

trnup_for_portfolio