THE BRIEF “ Design a product or service that gets better or more useful the more people use it so that sharing becomes more attractive and viable. “ - RSA design awards
I took a digital approach to the brief as I felt it would attract a large audience due to current growth online. The idea process started with a personal approach – what would I like to share? This gave me a great idea and my target audience, late teens through to late 20 year olds are largely into the festival / gig scene but sometimes find it hard to meet similar friends with the same musical interest. Although some groups of friends bond over music, music being the core of their friendship, in my case my friends do not appreciate the same musical talent as myself. GigShare was born from my personal dilemma, a social media platform that encourages people to share musical experience, and the more people that use GigShare the bigger and better it gets. GigShare has a similar function to Facebook, status updates / newsfeeds, friend search, event search ect, the whole site / app would be an online database of music and people who appreciate a variety of genres, you can search for people who like the same music as you and meet up with them to go to a gig.
RESEARCH “Festivals also helped keep the pound within Britain as half the surveyed AIF customers claimed that they chose to go to a festival in 2012, rather than travel overseas.” - The Association of independent festivals, June 2013
The RSA briefs are all about benefits and what the brief responses can do for the good of people, GigShare would have massive economy benefit by bringing people into both local communities and using food traders etc at festivals. The bigger picture helps a large amount of businesses gain a large profit and puts money back into local communities. In the last few years the economy has had a massive downfall with more and more people staying in the UK for their holidays rather than going abroad, the UK should embrace this and push the music event industry forward. Weston-super-mare hosts T4’s annual festival T4 on the beach, this one day event brings millions of pounds into the town and puts Weston-super -mare back on the map, this approach could work for other smaller communities and could assist greatly in the future of the UK’s smaller communities.
REBRAND
The rebrand for GigShare brought it into the 21st century and with my new skill set and knowledge I was able to make GigShare look professional and modern. I came up with my brand guidelines, chose the fonts I felt really worked, the font was a musical font fitting in well with the brief, I felt it gave GigShare the right feel. The logo was produced after lots of sketches and research within my sketchbook and the final plectrum logo approach was the most successful design so I developed this further. I gave GigShare a new colour scheme to make it look abit less IN YOUR FACE, and researched an image that I thought really worked well with the colour scheme, I also liked the abstract feel of the image (taken by Tom Bennett at Global Gathering, purchased for ÂŁ60.00) and brought this image to get all rights to it, this image has now become part of the brand.
MAKING IT MODERN “Increasingly, social media channels are keeping festivals at the forefront of attendees’ minds. Social media updates from key staffers and artists during the festival create personal connections.” - Christina Inge, eHow Contributor, June 2013 Throughout my development process I did some research, I looked into modern app and web design and tried to get a feel of layout and colour and the best way to make the applications display in the simplest of ways. Throughout my dissertation I came across a number of bits of information that assisted my development with GigShare, I spoke to the lead of Download festival Andy Copping who explained that social media has helped Download festival grow in the thousands, and with out such platforms may not have made it this far. GigShare would promote festivals by posting information on ticket sales / releases and other local events, this works along with the brief as it is a benefit to a lot of organisations.
THE APP I decided the app needed to have all of the following so the user can make a formal decision: Chat, Profiles, Event search and people search and a newsfeed. Today’s events will be displayed on your home page, updates from friends, your personal updates and GigShare’s recommendations and updates. The bottom menu will have 3 key features: Options menu, Chat and the Quick snap camera button. The camera button is always easily accessible so if you are attending an event and want to make a quick post to GigShare, you can with ease! The home page contains two icons located at the top, these are essential for the app app The search icon and the write post icon. The search icon obviously leads you to your search engine; I wanted people to have the opportunity to search for either events or people, and then their specifics on location. These search options wont be restricted though, if you want to search for all of these options at the same time, this is also possible. The write post option you would refer best to as a status update, this is where you can post what event tickets you have booked, what events you have attended or just some tunes you have been listening too - you can browse through your friends updates too through your home page news feed.
THE FUTURE “If Facebook looked how it did when it first began - nobody would of known how to use it!�
The profile page would contain a short bio, max of 35 words. It also displays how many friends you have made on GigShare and the amount of events you have attended through the app. The rest of the profile would consist of posts and images through out your GigShare experience. These posts would appear on your friends news feeds as well as your personal profile. The above quote was something I heard whilst at the Event production show in London, I found it extremely influential. There are many more things I would like to incorporate into GigShare, i.e. Festival Car share, Gig maps (mapping systems joined up with google maps to display only event venues) and more but I would not want to complicate the users initial first impression, everything would be built gradually over time.
Designed by Harriet Hamilton-Jones.