Make it stand out.
INTRODUCE YOUR BRAND
Make it stand out.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
The Journey
There’s quite a lot going on in this journey (over 9 years and counting), and I thought it best to break it up into discrete sections, with quick links to the relevant micro-case study. Here’s the overview, and the details of each section are just down below.
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For the first year or so, I mostly worked on editing theplatform that was already in place. Fairly generic in nature, it fel very… vanilla… missing many of the features the founder wanted in his product. (Case Study link here)
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When the time came to re-drawing the product, I made the ameteu’s mistake of designing directly in high-fidelity. Fortunately, the cient was unusually undersatnding - or perhaps they saw value in the output, despite the large, somewhat unreliable turnaround times they were experiencing.
(Case study link here) -
After finally designing an entire product line, it came time to hand over the work to development. And disappointment proceeded to unfurl. I hadassumed they’d just get it, butquickly realised that they saw nothing of the detail that we had designed into it. A rule-book had to be put in place that (more-or-less) guaranteed the transfer of oranized layouts. A very frustrating journey for me personally, but it paid dividends in the end.
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With a fair level of handover completed, it as time to tackle the larer eco-system, armed with our newly organized design system. This phase involved consolidating and stanardizing components to be replicated system-wide. I discovered the holy grail out of sheer necessity, and together we wielded it with a heavy hand over our nascent new prouct platform. It was a herculean effort, but we finally had the entire ecosystem accounted for.
(Case Study goes link here) -
Self-explanatory, no?
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This section has almost nothing to do with Gooru, but it does provide insight into my personal operations, internal motivations, and how I continued practising with my hard-earned skillset.
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Upon my return, a new project was on the cards. The client had found yet another bright light (Sunitha’s Bio link) to collaborate with, and together we re-built the mobile platform with a focus on personalization, and looking at the horizon of pivoting it towards a paid platform. This was an excellent time, where all the skill and focus I had acquired over the last 8 years had a chance to shine. And I think it did, too :)
(Case study link goes here)
Understanding the Situation
I joined Gooru at the end of 2015. I was brought in to help visualize a navigation system for learning, to enhance their learning platform. I started out doing a few creative visualizations for them, based on a circular, concentric organization plan, akin to the layers of a planet. I applied this as an ‘upgrade’ to their pre-existing study player, adding it as a pre-study screen, akin to checking your directions / completion status on Google Maps before setting off in whichever direction. I added a right-column overlay to display relevant statistics, as this was the kind of upgrade that didn’t require re-drawing the entire system, just building atop the existing foundation.
At this stage, I honestly didn’t know if anything would come off this collaboration, and I made an ameteur’s mistake; I didn’t capture the platform as it stood when I first encountered it. So you will have to take my word for it that the platform was fairly vanilla, with a simple accordion style to display the learning heirarchy Gooru was promoting. Though we never agreed on the circular strategy, they must have seen something useful in me, because they maintained a working relationship with me, and gave me several other bite-sized pieces of the platform to refresh. Alongside this, they also asked for work on ideas that had not as-yet been implemented, to be kept for a time in the future when it could be put together.
The other, bigger conversation behind the scenes was to develop a content browsing system, that we dubbed “Explore”. This was what the initial hiring conversation was about, and about 6 months into the job, I had enough understanding about the scale and depth that Gooru wished to achieve, to begin working on it. I was young and starry-eyed at the time, so I ambitiously came up with a space-themed UI for v1. I was still keen on the circular philosophy, and it must have been obvious because, despite my thinking then (and even today, honestly) that it was a great metaphor for the unknown… they didn’t buy it. They asked me to try again - most courteously, I must now confess - and so I came up with a ‘land-based’ theme, that might more directly speak to what we were referencing; a local area map.
An Amateur’s Mistake
Bla Bla Bla goes here, then there, then somewhere else.