Hidden Research

Many children's games involve hiding and seeking. A twist on these could make a fun response to the brief. I could also be done through photography, video, animation or still imagery. The main problem I could see with this is with photographing children.

Hidden Research

Where's Wally has been popular for a long time. Now there are spin offs such as Where's Bin Laden. There are also on-line games you can play where you search for hidden object within a scene. This is quite an obvious answer to the brief.

Hidden Research

One of my ideas for this project is to take pictures of Bath from angles that you would not necessarily see when you walk around generally. I would get an exact location of each photo and see if people can match the photos to the location from what they already know of Bath.

Hidden Research

A masked ball is exciting because everyone's identities are hidden and it adds a sense of mystery. I think this feeling should be captured in my project. I would like to do some photography exploring how much of someone you would need to hide before no-one would know them.

Super heroes also have this same air of mystery for those who don't know their identity. We love a good mystery and intrigue. Following the Super Hero theme secret lairs might be quite an interesting area to explore.

Hidden Research

A promotional film or advert about this could be quite interesting. Or an adventure series about people who find them.

Hidden Research

A word search structure could make an interesting typographic answer to the brief.

Here is a simple wordsearch I made myself. If I pursued this idea I would try and make multi-levelled ones on a more 3D platform. I would also try and make the shape reflect the content.

Hidden Research

Click on the image to enlarge and then look through it. See what appears.

If you look at this in the right way a helicopter will appear. I think something like this would be a nice answer to the Hidden brief however, there are already a huge selection of these puzzles so it would hard to be original. Also more research would be required into how to create these.

Here's Some That I Created

I found that the stronger the image the easier it is to see and the more successful it is. I tried text in the longer one and that is quite hard to read. If I continued this idea I would need to make bold striking designs with more thought on the 3D aspect.

To do these you might find it easier to click on them to enlarge. I like how striking they are very bold colours.

Research for Dynamic Word

Evalutaion

I was really pleased with the final outcome of this project. I really like the simple style of it. I did find this project quite hard to get into and although I found the workshops quite easy I didn't really give myself an opportunity to use what I learnt in my final piece as I created for iPhone and so all the roll overs and flash images wouldn't work. My main challenge in this brief was the shear volume of things that I could produce. I think the visit to the zoo really help to channel what I wanted to do and it helped me decide that I wanted to make something that children would use within the zoo. I then decided that it would be impossible to do something for all of the animals so I narrowed it down to six as a trial. I think that three questions per animal was a good choice to make. I believe that the thing that made this outcome successful was the decision to make each question fit into a story or challenge. I believe that this makes it more interesting for a child than just a normal question answer layout. When I first uploaded my site it came up tiny on an iphone which was a bit of a problem but I talked to anthony and he added coding to my site so that is now viewed at the right size.
One thing that I have now realised is that if I want the site to be seen all at one time without scrolling then I should have made it a bit smaller. However you its not too bad.
The main thing that I am really annoyed at myself with is spelling mistakes and words missing in the writing. I think because of the sheer volume of pages that I had the quality control went out the window a little bit. I think next time I really need to sit down and check my work thoroughly. I will try and change them if I get chance!!!

Just a quick note on product testing. This is something that I would have like to have tested however I don't know any children of the right age and they would have to go to the zoo to test it. However, I did show the result to a TA at a local primary school and she seemed quite positive that my site was in keeping with literature and visual stimulus already given children of 5 to 10. 

Research for Dynamic Word

Research for Dynamic Word

This was the first look for my website pages. I'm not really keen on the green background. So I have now removed that and it look a lot fresher and cleaner.

This is more of the look for my web pages. They are very simple. I have a few standard layouts that I am sticking to because I don't want it to become to fussy or complicated. I will follow this basic layout with all the different animals.

I have also decided to make it more engaging for the child. To do this the questions are set as tasks to help the animal achieve a goal which will then lead to the next question. I feel this format will keep the childs interest more than just asking a random set of questions. I also think I have start to aim for an older audience than originally intended as the amount of reading may be hard for a younger child. However, with a parents participation it would still be achievable.

I have kept the imagery very simple because this app is made to be used within the zoo and so I do not think it should take away from the zoo experience by being to flashy. I think it just needs to be enough to start of the childs imagination and then the real animal will be there to help the ideas flourish.