Got some feedback from Dave this week, since its been a bit since we've met up and he's been able to check out what's going on.
Right off the bat, he'd like to see more saturated colors everywhere. Partially that's my fault for designing everything and then dropping the opacity and putting them through different blend modes in order to get the transparency effects that I have going on almost everywhere. This is something I'm going to have to address with some color overlays, or that I can go in and add some magic via After Effects and this lovely lovely plugin that I adore so much -- http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/color_vibrance_plug-in/
He likes that I've gotten control of my type choices since the last time he checked it out. Previously when he had seen it, everything was basically stuck in CAPSLOCK and he felt like the interface was screaming at him.
Like I mentioned in a previous post, I've been messing with differentiating selected buttons from non-selected buttons. I've been doing this by changing the text color to solid black to stand out against a brighter background, but Dave says it's not working. His eyes were more drawn to the two tabs in the beginning that aren't selected, so I should switch my thinking on what's going on there.
He liked the icons that I have going on at the moment. Likes that some are centered, some go to the edges, and some are angled. He doesn't like that when the research icons all drop down, it's a wall of the same drab color. So like I was thinking in a previous post, I'm going to have to revisit my approach with the icons and introduce more colors. Maybe I can be successful with a 2-3 color scheme -- background, details, main focus of the icon.
Another thing regarding the icons, he's interested in the shape language of the boxes and the icons enough that he'd like me to explore adding a cool mouse over flare for them since those would be clickable.
Lastly, he's a big fan of the flashiness of what I have going on in the "Design Workshop" screen. Again I need to address how the colors of things are skewing towards muddy and change them so that they pop and make things more interesting to look at, which is going to help it even more because the animation whiz bang stuff that I have going on is heading in such a cool direction.
Really liking the direction this project is trending in now. I really like mocking up animations to show how all of this stuff will look, and I feel like getting the Design Workshop screen down was a pretty big step, and the pizazz that I have going on there is going to affect how I approach animating going forward. Part of what makes it so successful in my opinion is the speed of things appearing and moving on the screen. Up until this point I feel like most of the animations have felt very labored and heavy handed -- while it's hard to make glowing buttons exciting, I do still feel like I can speed things up in the beginning portion of this animation quite a bit. There's still a lot to do, and things from the previous blog pos that I haven't gotten to address, but I'm hoping that this next week will just be all about the polish of things, and less about adding content.