Seen, Unseen Process Book

Project Reflection:

Seen, Unseen Amanda Reiter

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Selection The location I chose for my project was “Fortune Teller Bar� in Cherokee street. I happened upon the bar by chance while out with friends, and fell in love. They serve up all kinds of drinks and snacks, but most importantly, was the ambience of the place. The bar is filled with strange objects-- from taxidermied animals, to potions and bottles. To the side of the bar was a small room that looked like a witches apothecary where a lady would read your tarot cards. All around, it was a very mysterous and witchy place.

For my project, I wanted to make an app based on the experience that I had at this bar. I decided to make an app that would act like a pocket tarot deck, in order to bring a modern approach to the ancient tradition.

Taroy card decks are very heavy and big and it takes years to master and memorize the cards. I thought what if there was a way to provide the tarot experience given in the mysterious old-timey bar, but also make it available in the palm of your hand.

(left) a photo I took of a shelf at the bar

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Discovery I created a word map of things I saw and associated with the bar as a starting point for my search. I looked for examples of cool tarot cards onlines, interesting apps, as well as photos and paintings that gave me spooky, witchy vibes.

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For the artistic direction of my app, I played around with various home screen concepts to get the ball rolling on the rest of my app. I tried creating a graphic, line based style, tried using photographs, and lastly tried a couple variations using the old dover images. I vetoed the graphic line art piece, as it looked to similar to things that had been done before and using photographs also felt unoriginal. I attempted to recreate a witch’s tabletop using these vintage imgages, but that image ended up being to static. In the end, I went with the old vintage dover image scans floating around the page to give a unique take on the creepy, witchy vibe. Because these Dover images were remnicient of medieval witchcraft woodcuts, the theme worked well.

To create the image, I mainly was inspired by the use of the Dover images. Because the content of the Dover scans was limited, I worked to mix and match collage them to create new items. For example, to make a crystal ball I combined three different household appliances. For some of the items, I directly drew on them. For example the hand, I cropped out an image of one of the men’s hands, and then drew on it to look like a palm reader hand guide in the final version.

(right) the final home screen concept

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I also started organizing how I wanted my app to look like and how I wanted it to flow. I decided on five sections: A lesson guide (teaching rules of tarot), card reading, a card database, an about page (to give information about this app/Fortune Teller Bar), and a home page.

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Refinement I started testing out different typefaces as well as different color schemes. During my first critique I was told that my white and light teal color palette didn’t fit the dark and spooky vibe of the bar.

In addition, I started fleshing out how each of the parts of the app would work. I opted to choose the allow the user to flip through the tarot cards to choose as if they were swiping through a real shuffled deck, using the arrow cards. To make user experience as simple as possible, after the user gets their cards I made it so that they could click on the card to understand what it means in respect to the type of spread they chose, rather than having to search each card seperately in the directory. This would make it much easier for users to get a reading and understad it with a simple click of a button.

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(above) Finalized sketch of the flowchart of my app

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I wanted to avoid using classic witchy colors such as orange or purple because I felt that would make the piece feel tacky. I ended up going with a much darker color palette, using a dark blue background with rich emerald colored touches. I inversed the Dover images to lay on the dark background in white, which felt made the image look a lot creepier than before. For my tarot card designs, I went with a creepy “butterfly pinning” motif, and utilized these moths/butterflies throughout. This was inspired by the pinned butterflies that I saw at the Fortune Teller’s bar that felt extremely unsettling.

I was given feedback to add some golden yellow into my designs, and to show what would happen if a button was “touched/clicked” so I made mockups for those concepts. Originally, all of my text was in a serif typeface but I changed it to a san serif to be readable on the dark background.

All of the information I researched myself, and attempted to cut down at to break into key points that would be simple for a first-time tarot card user to understand.

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(above) Different tarot card image variations

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Fixes for Critique For final critique, I fixed up the things that I was critiqued on the week before in class in order to make the app more readable and accessable by splitting up the information and making the typeface and navigation bigger. For information with text, I made it so you could swipe through to different screens to read the entire thing (as marked by the little circles at the bottom showing what page you are on.) I also fixed the front and back of the tarot cards to make them relate to each other better. Lastly, I upped the contrast between the green and the dark background.

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