Dan Mall and a collaborator review design comps for an app called Vice. They debate whether to position it as a humorous butler serving your vices or make it broader to cover everything from scotch to fast food, and discuss animated vector icons and DrawScript workflows for animations.
Record everything and then decide what to put up or not.
Okay, I think that sounds fine. I mean, if people really want, they can go and figure out our YouTube pages and go from there.
Right? True.
And while you're doing that, by the way, I'm posting hopefully to the correct Tumblr.
Okay, cool.
I'm listening. And I'm working at the same time.
Gotcha. So I think the last time we talked about this, and this might be out of sequence for the people that are following along, but we'll try and catch them up with everything. We'll post stuff and maybe our last discussion or something. So I posted, I sent you some comps, and we were like, it wasn't really the right tone for what the app could be. So the last thing we talked about was kind of shifting the tone to be a little bit more humorous but deadly looking.
Right? Yeah, we talked about, like, What did we talk about? I remember sending you zombie wrapping paper from ThinkGeek as the right term for this thing. Right? Yeah. And we looked at. Did you find those animated icons or whatever it was that you were looking for?
No, I didn't. Maybe I'll just tweet about it later today and see if anybody remembers it. I'll try to dig those up because I think they might be what you're looking for. But I mean, the stuff that we talked about last time is the stuff I think is along the same lines anyway.
Well, the other thing is that we talked about it. We talked a lot about my feedback to your comps, and I think that those comps should probably go up shortly after this video or maybe even before. But I sort of felt like you were hearing my feedback and I didn't hear what your. I mean, I know you designed what you thought, but I don't know if you can objectively look at it and say whether or not you agree with what I was saying or not.
I agree with what you were saying. And mostly I designed comps so that we had something to look at to say yes or no. And after thinking about it and hearing your feedback, I think I realized why I went the direction that I did. And I have something a little more concrete to be able to say, oh, what about this? So I don't think that the first version was right at all. I think it was something to get something on a screen. And I think maybe some of the IA is right there or some of the elements on screen are right, but I don't think the tone is right. I think what I was trying to go for, and I didn't really have this as a concrete idea until maybe like a day ago, was what if the branding was like a butler serving you your next vice? That's what I was trying to go for. That's why when we talked about the Urban Daddy apps or the I said like, it feels like Scotch. You know, it feels like that's the thing that I should be. And so I thought about it and I was like, well, the icon would be like a tuxedo and like a silver platter. And on your silver platter would be a Pepsi or a burger or a scotch or a hooker or a cigar or, you know, whatever it is. Because I think it still has that deadliness to it, but it's still sort of humorous because you're being served something that you know is going to kill you.
Right. And this is probably a good time to point out that we're. Until we'll have a better branding exercise. But for the time being, we've just been calling this thing Vice because the big key to it just expanding on what we talked about in the first video was that this dieting thing works for any kind. This idea of a monthly kind of restriction works for anything. It can work for Scotch or hookers or like, we're not being judgy. It's like, this is your poison. This is the thing that you just want to give into. So, yeah, so for the time being, we're calling it Vice, but I see where you're going with it on that. And I guess I saw it as like, I still saw it as like there's something kind of, I don't know, like the thing about Urban Daddy and guilt and that kind of thing is that it kind of like it almost. And those are great brands and I'm not criticizing at all, but they're like, they are like luxurious, but also kind of like accessible to a certain kind of audience, you know what I mean? Which I guess is like where Scotch, if scotch is branded, that's like how it's supposed to be like, you know, like high class sort of thing or whatever. And for me, this should serve just as easily having McDonald's or a milkshake as it does a glass of scotch or like a soda. And so it needs to be like, I think accessible in that way as I'm talking, it needs to feel like friendly and inviting, but at the same time account for. It's very broad. Right? It should feel pretty broad, I think.
Yeah, it's got to apply for shopping just as much as it does for having a cheeseburger. I think what I'm going to do or what I'm going to try is to work on both versions at the same time, and then for us to look at two and see which one works better overall, or if there are elements of each that we both like. And I think it'll just, as an exercise, help me to figure out how to express something in two different ways, how to express the same idea in two different ways, so that we could at least look at it that way. So that's probably going to be my next step.
Yeah, that sounds pretty good to me from my end. One of the things that we talked about a lot is the idea of animated icons, like Forecast IO Style or as is kind of like trending along as trends go. But the idea of playing that up a little bit, I'm still very stuck on. I almost imagine the Shake Shack icon, honestly, and I just see that. But almost meets, I don't know, a Domo Kun or something like that, and happy. And I know I'm really stuck on it right now. But my idea for that is to just get a couple of vector icons and, like, play a little bit. I might even like. There's this tool that I'm a big fan of that I've told you about before called Draw Script, where you get, like, you take, like, a vector shape, and then it's like an extension for Illustrator, and you just click on the extension and you get like, just the. Like the, like, bezier curve. Like, basically the code that you need to, like, draw that shape out in, like, machine code, whether that's Objective C or Open Framework C or even Canvas. I used it for the arbitrary logo. So I just thought that just playing around with that tool a little bit more and seeing if there's fun ways to create animations and maybe even Draw Script is probably just too far. Maybe it's just I need some vector shapes or just some pings that I just move around and see if there's something that comes out of that. That's kind of where my head is there. And the other place I'm at is, like, to continue to just kind of sketch pencil and paper how it could work.
Cool. I think that's a good place to stop because we both have stuff to do, so let's just do that for the next day or two and reconvene. Do you feel good about that?
That sounds good to me.
All right. Bye.
Bye.
