Principia Arbiter

The site I was work­ing on ear­lier this week­end is now up. View it at http://curioucity.me/. It’s a mobile app land­ing page for a Japan­ese game devel­oper. I think I man­aged to get out of my typo­graph­i­cal com­fort zone and I really like how it turned out.

I was in the mid­dle of devel­op­ing ONE-R Inc.‘s cor­po­rate web­site when Mr Shun­suke made me look at a land­ing page his team was doing for a mobile appli­ca­tion they were sub­mit­ting to SXSW Inter­ac­tive 2012. It was two days ago on Fri­day when I looked at the mock­ups and told him what I thought. The logo was really good but I wasn’t impressed with the site design and the pony mas­cot that was on it. Then he asked me to help with the design. There were only six­teen hours left before the sub­mis­sion dead­line and the site would have to be up when the SXSW panel looks at the sub­mis­sion. I had to improve the pony mas­cot, design a site around the logo and the new mas­cot and code it within a really short time. And so I did.

The app com­bines fea­tures in Foursquare and Bel­uga into a real-time location-based chat util­ity but with­out the cum­ber­some groups (pods) struc­ture of Bel­uga. You are sup­posed to share infor­ma­tion, tips, deals and gen­er­ally chat within the con­text of a locale. I haven’t seen the app and this is all I know.

The logo was already done by their designer. I thought it had great per­son­al­ity. The color was as bold as the heavy yet ele­gant script font. It was an aes­thetic that some­how reminded me of choco­late and con­fec­tionery. Things like waxed paper, pin­stripes, gold foil, sweet choco­late and kraft came to mind.

The orig­i­nal pony mas­cot had a look of some­thing you might find in a lit­tle girl’s toy box of Bar­bie Dolls. It’s visu­ally inco­her­ent with the logo. Thus I had to make a new pony motif that fits the logo better.

The pony’s tail were delib­er­ately un-ponytail-like. The flat ends matched the flat top edges of the logo’s low­er­case char­ac­ters. The tapered and curved tips of the pony’s mane mim­ic­ked the C’s pointed finial. The chunky body would match the heft of the script.

I’ved paired FF Roice for the head­lines with Gills Sans for body text. Although Roice was designed in 2003 and Gill Sans in 1926, the con­trast­ing shapes go well together. The mechan­i­cal form of Roice also pre­vented the whole look from going to far in the direc­tion of the con­fec­tionery aesthetic.

The comic’s really cute and adds a lot of life to the page. It’s well drawn by the client’s artist and illus­trates the pur­pose of the appli­ca­tion very well.

For a land­ing page done within a day, I’m really sat­is­fied. Curi­oc­ity will be launch­ing in SXSW 2012 on iPhone and Android. Please look for­ward to it.

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