Emma: Mood board and Style Tiles
Emma: Exercise and Movement Motivation App.
Intro
As we begin to create the brand of our app, we decided to each attempt to visualize how we wanted our brand to feel. We came up with individual mood boards and style tiles and collaborated together to create a final group style tile.
Individual
Esme
When we decided on the name Emma, I immediately thought about orange. For my mood board, I was inspired by other orange apps. I also envisioned illustrations in the app so I found apps that had professional and playful illustrations.
Our app aims to be approachable and easy to use so I wanted to keep a playful vibe. I chose analogous colors surrounding an orange color and kept the overall style pretty modern.
Sarah
I wanted my mood board to emphasize the collaborative and friendly nature of the app, so I chose icons that would emphasize that. As a team, we had discussed the trend of orange in fitness apps, so I chose to include that vibe in my mood board as well.
I was inspired by modern, minimalist apps so I chose colors and fonts that emphasized that. I thought that whatever app we design should be gender-neutral despite the name, and as such, I included green as the contrast color.
Misbah
Our team decided on the color orange since we liked its brightness and its association with fitness through other fitness apps. Thus, I focused my mood board on the color orange, and in the color palette, orange was the main color. The overall vibe that I wanted the mood board to convey was fun, social, bright, motivating, and competitive because I want people who are daunted by exercise to find our app accessible, enjoyable, and effective. Based on this vibe, in the color palette, I paired the orange with other fun and bright colors to ensure that our app would be very lively. The pictures I used captured these ideas of competition, exercise, friends, and motivation, and they all worked together to give off a fun and energetic vibe.
In the color palette, I paired our chosen color orange with other fun and bright colors to ensure the app had a fun and bright vibe. To give the app a sleek but fun feel, I chose a sleek sans serif font and clean rounded buttons, input boxes, and dropdowns. For the icons, I chose minimalist but effective icons, and I envisioned that these icons would be used in the app’s bottom navigation bar to access the quick exercise, videos, leaderboard, and profile screens. Finally, the adjectives orient the fun and accessible direction that we want the style to convey.
Anand
During class on Tuesday, our group decided on the orange color since it’s associated with fitness by other apps such as Strava, which is quite well-known, and OrangeTheory Fitness, which some people in the U.S. see in their neighborhoods. I wanted the app to have an encouraging, engaging vibe, and I tried to find examples of apps that had a low barrier to entry to start exercising. The triple-screen app at the top of the mood board encapsulates this idea: each screen has the essentials you need to get moving, see how far you’ve come, pause/end the workout, and nothing more. The Uber app isn’t thematically related to our project, but I liked its typography.
Having decided on orange, I used a color wheel to get inspiration for the other two colors. I thought red would evoke a sense of urgency — it’s time to move! — and blue was more calming. Down Dog’s usage of blue felt grounding. The icons I selected are all of people doing exercises that don’t require equipment and can be done in a room with a reasonable amount of space. I deliberately didn’t include icons of people doing exercises that users might find more intimidating or perceive as having higher barriers to entry, such as weightlifting.
Anjini
In designing this mood board, I was inspired to focus on orange because of its existing association with workout brands, such as Strava and Orange Theory. The emphasis on orange has also begun to permeate consumer products relating to fitness, such as the Nike Air Max shoes or Fabletics leggings. I included a number of different running sites as inspiration for “locations” to which we may take our users when they use our gamified platform. Finally, I liked the cheetah as a symbol of athleticism and speed; the cheetah also connotes a certain “wildness” or liberation through physical fitness that I felt could set the tone for our app.
I hoped to balance the orange tones associated with increased exercise with earthy green tones associated with the outdoors. I continue to use a cheetah as an athletic symbol but choose a cartoon representation to ensure the app’s interface is friendly and approachable. The fonts chosen are minimalist but slightly playful, and the buttons have rounded edges to complement the playful (rounded) yet motivational (dark orange) tone.
Group Style Tile
Style Reasoning
- We all enjoyed the retro style Emma font.
- We agreed on the Kangaroo icon because it felt friendly but not childish.
- We kept the orange color, constant through all of our individual style tiles.
- Green as a complement to orange — this color brings a nice contrast and outdoorsy feeling
- We all liked Misbah’s icon for its simplicity
- Buzzwords are a conglomeration of individual buzzwords — fun, motivational, encouraging, and competitive
