Sixth Reflection

I have just completed a fairly large and complex part of my project, the opening intro. I have been working on it for quite some time now, batting back and forth over different ideas, and how I want it to look. The best way I can describe this process is from a quote from the article Footholds for Design by Shahaf Gal.

“Like the rock climber, designers face similar challenges in design settings. Situations of design evolve constantly as a designer secures a point in the design on which he feels safe relying, then moves on again.”

With my introduction I knew what I had to work with, a picture of the US map, my racecar image, and I wanted something to catch the user’s attention (I didn’t know what it was yet, but I knew I wanted something). So I began playing around in flash with a number of different ideas, trying to see which ones I liked. The first “foothold” I reached was the sound. I searched the internet high and low for a racecar sound, and finally found a sound from a NASCAR race of the cars zooming by. I thought that would really catch the user’s attention, so I started with that.

The next step I took was figuring out a way to incorporate the racecar in with the sound. What I finally came up with was having the car zoom across the screen as the racing sounds played in the background. I really liked this because it relates to the idea that I have been all up and down the east coast.

OK good, two steps down, wow this design thing is easy, haha, NO. Then I hit a bump in the road, I had a mental roadblock, I couldn’t thing of how to finish off the intro. So I did what any good rock climber does, I saved my work, setup “base camp” and stepped away from the project for a bit. After taking a step back the idea finally hit me while I was listening to some music on my computer. A song from one of my favorite artists, Big & Rich came on, “Comin’ to your city”, and there it was, I had it! The song fit perfectly because they sing about traveling all around the US visiting all these different cities, and the good times they had. It was a match made in heaven! So I was able to import a small section of the song into my project, and I liked it so much I even renamed my project after it; Jeremiah’s Comin’ to Your City!

Reference:
Gal, S. (1996). Footholds for design. In Winograd, T. (Ed.), Bringing Design to Software (pp. 215-227). New York: Addison-Wesley.