Orion Gael - Tydal

Duration

Tools Used

2 Weeks

Adobe XD, Adobe Illustrator

Summary

What is Tydal? Tydal is a conceptual community-building platform based around connecting artists with inspiration, knowledge, and their contemporaries.

The Challenge: This project was inspired by the 2021 Adobe Creative Jam prompt. The assignment was to design a brand new platform that would connect individuals with information and communities for entertainment and skill building. Designers were encouraged to achieve this goal in an innovative way, and to draw inspiration from the Twitch.tv platform.
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Preview

Ideation

My teammate and I began by writing down all of the main requirements of the project. This allowed us to brainstorm a central cohesive theme that could encapsulate all of the necessary functions in a new and interesting way.

Once we had determined the type of platform that wanted to create, we drafted an initial sketch.

Developing the Brand Identity

My teammate and I decided to give the brand an oceanic theme. Our idea was to conjure an image of the vastness of the ocean and apply that feeling to our platform, making it feel like a boundless sea of creative opportunity.

The Logo

I set out to make a logo in line with our ocean theme. I tried out some different iconography, such as clamshells, waves, diving helmets, etc., but settled on another idea.

I designed the logo to look like a ship wheel to evoke the sense that the user is driving a ship to wherever they want to go; I wanted to make them feel like captains.

I removed the top spokes of the wheel to form a subtle capital "T" across the icon. For the typeface, I went with Mont Bold for its blend of strong geometric blockiness and friendly modernity.

The Product

After establishing our branding direction and identifying our main use cases, we went about prototyping our feature set. As we undertook this process, we decided to narrow the platform's focus down to a mutual passion of ours: art.

Home

The homepage was designed with a clear hierarchy in mind. Algorithmically recommended live streams or videos would take up the banner area of the page. Topics/categories would act as a functional divider, and groups ("Bubbles") would come third.
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Bubbles

"Bubble" is Tydal's word for "group." Bubbles are meant to allow users to feel like they are part of a tight knit community, shielded from the chaos of open waters. They can be used to share interests, tips, videos, live streams, and more.
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Dives

Dives are a feature unique to Tydal. A dive is a group exploration of random content for the purpose of discovery.

In a normal Dive, a user can be placed into a group lobby that will cycle to different random content at given time intervals. There is a chatroom for the lobby, allowing the Dive group to comment on the content as they drift through the site like a school of fish.
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The "Deep Dive" is the same as a dive, but restricted to content within a category, such as digital art or 3D modeling.
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Lessons and Limitations

As this was a project with a very fast turnaround, the end product was still very conceptual and not fleshed out.
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However, I did get valuable experience in product design as a collaborative effort, becoming familiar with the processes of brainstorming, discussing, and iterating. I also enjoyed further exploring Adobe XD's newly added features, which were great for both practicality and inspiration.