In a recent post I made the public goal of completing all of the videos for my first AIUX course by June 30– a goal that was not achieved. I estimated 12 videos that needed to be made for one of the major sections, but that turned out to be more like 40 videos. I did still manage to finish them all three days after my goal though, so I still consider that a win.
Sitting in a room by yourself with no windows and recording videos of yourself teaching the design process of a project you’ve already designed is quite the mental task, but after several weeks of intense screen time, I’m thrilled that milestone is complete.
I treated myself this week by working on some branding and art direction for AIUX as a whole. I designed a custom logotype and started building out parts of an entire font for the new look. Type design has addictive qualities so I had to cut myself off before I got in too deep. Overall I’m pretty happy with how the logotype turned out.
screenshot from the type design in Glyphs
And a possible variation with the course name:
I’ve wanted AIUX to have a certain type of military or futuristic feel since the beginning and I like the idea of upgrading your weaponry, skills, and tactics– in regards to software speed and UX understanding. Here are some words and adjectives I’ve had in the back of my mind when designing the logo and doing some brand exploration:
- Illustrator Orange
- Tech
- Futuristic
- Space Travel (Probably because I’ve been reading and loving “The Martian”)
- Dharma Initiative
- Military
- Advanced
- Tactical
- Weaponry
With this in mind I’ve put together a few branding boards and sprinkled in a bit of Nasa Commons imagery. I feel like I need to keep the orange color palette used for the Adobe Illustrator icon and launch image, but I’m a little torn on how true to color I should stay. I like the direction overall, but I’m sure it’ll get tweaked as I start coding up the new site and course pages.
I'm not sure how much of the imagery I'll actually use on the site, but it helps give a feel for the direction.
The videos were by far the toughest part of this project, so I’m really really glad I knocked those out first. I’ll continue to play with some design stuff this week as well as layout the course structure.
I plan to have a few rough prototypes coded up so they can be ported over to the app code next week. My friend Jess Brown is helping me with a basic rails app to handle stripe payment processing, authentication, course and module creation, as well as tracking progress throughout. I’m pretty pumped how this is coming together so far.
I’ll be issuing the alpha course invitations soon, so If you’re interested in learning rapid UX design and helping shape this course I’d love for you to hop on the list.
Update
The private beta was a smashing success.
Get notified the next time the course goes live.
