Novelty
Social software for niche people.
Project Type: UI/UX design, Apps
Tasks: apps, UX, UI, social software.
Tools: Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop
The Beginning
With the development of the times, various subcultures have been accepted, such as sexual orientation, ACG culture, hacking, and punk culture. But most people are not willing to let friends or family know them. Among these subcultures, there is a group of people who really like to search for strange and special things, such as visually: strange, darkness, and even distorted works, cults, physiologically: ASMR (Autonomous sensory meridian response), psychologically: Stockholm syndrome. They may not be one of them, but they like to know the cultures that people avoid talking about. These cultures are highly controversial, and they may not discuss this with their best friends because there are very few people who can accept them. Internet is a great invention. It allows us to have more different choices. Also no one has the same hobbies as you in your school or in your city, but the entire province, the whole country or the whole world you can always find a group of people with similar interests like you.
Research
I like to read some article such as why some people are born with criminal genes or anti-social psychology. But I found out that I am a positive person, but I am really excited when I know these trivia. With my communication with some friends, I found that most people like to learn or read these trivia, which does not mean they are such people. Now there are many social software such as Facebook — for the public, Twitch — for gamers, Snapchat — for young people who like to share their lives, LinkedIn — for business customers. But there is no software that provides a communication platform for cold knowledge enthusiasts and protects their privacy.
In this project, I decided to do an app for these people who want to seek novelty.
It will be kind like PCG app (Professional Generated Content). You makes your personal file in this app and you can make people see or not. Sometimes people don’t want other knows who they are but they want to share their opinion with other online. You also can find the titles, images or music in there. You can share them to your friend and collection them in this apps.
I will use gradient in this app, and the style will be colorful. Cause some of the content may makes people uncomfortable, so I use the cartoon style to make it easier to accept.
Problem
By searching for information, before I started designing my work, I found that the main problem is that there are a lot of social software designed for different people in the market. I have raised several questions.
1. How can I make my software unique and let people know that this is not a social software like a fakebook?
2. Many cold knowledge or some small art works often give people an uncomfortable feeling. How can people avoid this feeling?
3. How can one see that this is an interesting software?
In the profile page, we can see how many people follow him and how many people he followed, and we can also follow him on his profile page. You can repost someone’s post and add your own comments. You can also comment directly on your friend’s post.
It was a challenge for me in the choice of color. I chose the orange to blue gradient at the beginning, but I found this color to be too easy and pleasant, more like a clothing brand. I don’t want my work to give people a feeling of being too relaxed, so I added the Low Poly style to the orange-blue gradient. This changed my color from easy to mysterious.
In the discovery page, we can see the hot topic of the day. The topic with the most daily participation will be displayed in the discovery page. At the same time I designed several icons as categories. I also encountered many problems in the design of the art icon. I hope this software is unique, so I don't want to use common type icons. I searched the web for many icon types, but most of the art icons are brushes, pencils, or painters, but my art classification is not just about painting, but also some performance art, so I designed a shape of a mask, it embodies art as a mask. Artist have chance to show themself through art and find the people who know them inside through their work.
In the message page, I prefer to add more features. Users can not only chat with friends on this page, but also view the information of the official account of their subscription. If someone mention you, comment on your post, or click on like, you can find it in the message at the first time.
In the web version, the user can send the post directly on the home page, and you can see some systems speculate that the topic you are interested in is pushed to you.
This project allowed me to learn a lot about ui design, such as font selection and color matching. I am very happy that I can implement my ideas, which is why I love design.
Thank you for reading.
GW