Salisbury Cathedral

Uni App Project

Puzzle App for Salisbury Cathedral to celebrate the Magna Carta exhibition
August 23, 2023

App Design Mockups

After talking with my group about the initial design of and going head with my design idea I then went onto making a slightly more fleshed out design, which showed my new ideas and changes to my initial design. I also went and created all the shapes used in the game for all the questions. My idea was to make at least 2 similar shapes and 2 which are incorrect. This made designing all the shapes quite easy when the questions where decided upon. This also helped as I took many pictures during our 3 visits to Salisbury Cathedral.

The app design has changed in small ways throughout the input of the client and from our group and the way we wanted the app to be presented. At the start of the design the app was predominantly white with a few bright primary colours which stood out and surrounded the answers to the questions for the app. I also designed the app to have a minimalistic feel to it, to make navigation and visual aids easy to understand. The app was also presented in a specific way, with the main buttons being circular and the answers having a similarly bright outline to them. After being given the colour scheme and visiting the Cathedral in our own time, we decided to change the main design of the app to fit in with the rest of the exhibit and the other graphics used by Red Balloon. This meant removing the white background and replacing it with a cream colour which matched the colour palette. After looking around the exhibition I realised that the bright colours in contrast would not fit but instead have a two tone colour scheme which would accent the content but not make each piece of content fight for the attention of the audience. This level of hierarchy would allow the app to have order and allow subtle visual pointers for easy navigation of the app. As well as redesigning the app colour scheme I also changed the way the apps buttons and navigation was displayed. This was now done through much larger buttons which gave the app a much more full feeling. This is shown not only in the navigation and menus but also on the question pages. We also made small changes to the apps main page and in particular the logo for the app. We were originally using the Cathedral Logo however found that the logo used by Red Balloon portrayed the importance of shapes even in the content of their own work. The main change for the app however was in the design style of the questions. We decided that the use of shapes would be a large factor which made our app stand out and be visually pleasing. When looking around the Cathedral for questions we found that a large proportion of the categories were to do with the Architecture and the shapes found within the space. This led us to make our app all to do with the shapes found within the Cathedral. When first thinking about the idea of representing the whole church through shapes we first went to take pictures. This allowed us to show the audience the space and question them on what was different or which shape fitted where. This led to confusion and on a design point very lacking. This led our group to come up with representing the shapes as line drawings. This collectively made the shapes come together where the pictures were lacking. The shapes were designed with similar weight and size and gave the whole app a continued aesthetic. This linked the whole building together and made the app have a continued feel which would have been broken apart by the pictures. The use of shapes not only allowed for a design aspect to be applied but also a practical aspect. The use of simple shapes makes the app very accessible to a large audience. Many overseas visitors come to the Cathedral and the app would provide a simple way of experiencing the space without a large amount of knowledge on the language. The use of shapes also makes the app accessible to families and in particular young children who we were targeting previously at the beginning stages of the design.