Transmedia

Brief

This project was to create the media pack for the annual transmedia exhibition at the University of Winchester. For this project, I was in a team which was all designers, so we had to work out how to play to each persons strengths. The role in which I undertook was the website design as I wanted a chance to strengthen my website and prototyping skills.

Brainstorming Inital Ideas

Early on in the project, we decided to go with an idea that I had come up with which was centred around trains. This was because we wanted to reflect the creative journeys that our students undertake between 1st year to 3rd year and potentially then onto masters. We wanted to celebrate the progress that is being taken and the development of work.

Research & Development

Above you can see our initial brainstorming session. We explored tube maps designs as they best reflected our vision and researched into the artist Henry Beck who created them in 1931. Following this research, we also explored other countries version of this including the Spanish Metro. Once we had an understanding of the history and context behind these iconic maps, we started generating ideas of how we can make transmedia more immersive.

We all commented on the fact that although last years transmedia was good, there wasn't any interactivity. There was no map given out to visitors, no signage, very little promotion and nothing to do as you went around. I started researching on how we could improve this whilst still staying within the theme and found that previously artists have put down electrical tape for signage of their events. We decided that this would work perfectly as we can draw people in right from reception, all the way through our exhibition and then towards popular stops such as the café. This worked perfectly in terms of physical interaction, however we decided that we still needed more interaction. This is where the website and social media come in to play. With early, hard to miss and vibrant signage and promotion we will ensure that we increase visitors as well as visibility.

Creative Journey

When starting to design the website, I was struggling to visualise how I wanted the outcome to look. I initially tried to bring all of the pathways as well as the years onto the website and immediately decided against this due to the accessibility nightmare and the complexity of the design.

However, after seeing my team mate Rob's poster designs, I had an idea to translate this into a website. I decided to utilise these designs and bring them to life. The poster was clearly recognisable as part of National Rail thanks to its typography, clean design and bold colour scheme.

Once I had these concept designs produced, I then was able to visualise how the website should look. In order to bring these designs to life, I decided to use figma, a software that I had had limited experience with and had never used for prototyping. After a couple of hours of playing around with the software, it was then really simple to create the designs and prototype these in a wireframe format. Choosing to use figma meant that when we were presenting to the client, I could offer for them to try out the designs, something which had a massively positive outcome. Below you can find my finished prototype.

Website Wireframe

Finished Prototype

See all year 2 work