SPACED Challenge — App design review and my TOP 3 picks

I'm the client. I've got a creative brief, and I need three things. I need a logo, an app, and a homepage. I need your help. Okay, so here's what we're gonna do. Here's what we're gonna do. Dan Petty posted the Spaced challenge on his YouTube channel and everything online. Dribble, Instagram, Twitter, Spaced Challenge hashtag. It's actually pretty crazy. Look at all of these here. Let me zoom you in a little bit. But just look at this. This is crazy. This is just on dribble. It just doesn't stop. It goes on and on and on. Logos, websites, apps. It's crazy. I'm going to pick my top three. App design only. So Dan's creative brief had an app design, a logo design, and a homepage for space. It was like two space and back safely. He said the company was, like, more virgin than United. The spacesuits were made by Nike. You can watch that. I'll link it. If you haven't seen it, you should definitely check it out before you watch this whole thing. But what I'm going to do is pick my top three and talk about what I like about them and also critique them. But I'm also going to do a quick pass at all of these that have kind of caught my eye, whether it's been from Twitter or Dribble. So, anyway, let's dig in and check these out. All right, first one here from Kyle McDowell. I like. I like the. You know, when I first look at the shot, it's simple and clean, but it also just feels a little bit lacking. There's not a lot of detail on here in terms of, like, booking or feeling. There's so many cool images of space and the moon, and this one just feels a little bit watered down. Not quite as, like, compelling to pull it in. And this text right here especially seems super small. This one is from Tom Space Challenge mobile app. See, so this is pretty. This is pretty nice. I wish I could zoom out. Let me go back. All right, zoom out. So he's got a little animation thing going on. I like the, you know, part of the brief was black and white with, like, an accent color. And this is. This is pretty cool. I like the. The dark with the. The moon red accent and some of these accents. Some of these, like JFK to tmn. Let me see if I can go to the bigger one. Like, I like this idea, but it's. It's also feels slightly, maybe hard to use. I'm not sure. It's also Hard. It's really hard to critique an app when you're not kind of going through it linearly. So that is a challenge to show. It looks like there's a. A little bit of a. Like, a white background that didn't get quite, like, masked out or something. Anyway, I don't want to spend too much time on each one of these. Okay. This one is on UP Labs by Nick Richardson. I like the white interface. I like the kind of spacesuit, space astronaut feel to this, but I also think that it feels a little bit lacking and kind of like, I don't know, maybe these. These. These calls to action feel like they're not really calling me to action. It kind of feels like the rest of the interface. And then I think the typography is a little bit. Needs to be kind of refined and maybe a little bit tighter, you know, because you have, like, the Moon, Earth, Mars flight status are all slightly different sizes. And then these numbers here are calling my attention to the, you know, the most on that screen, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But, you know, you would kind of want the main call to action, like, find flights be the strongest call to action, and you would want your, you know, hierarchy to represent that. So it just feels a little bit. A little bit loose and not really defined in terms of, like, a systematic, scannable way to read it. All right. This is from Martha Bergman. I saw. So I saw this prototype on Twitter and maybe on Dribble, and the prototype itself feels a little bit slow. Like, I like the motion, but it's kind of like, takes a while for the things to move around, and I think that. I think that hurts. I think the designs are actually better than the prototype, and I think showing it only in the prototype form because it kind of feels slow and not quite refined, it makes it not as appealing. But if you go to the page where she's, you know, designed some of this stuff and you only look at the designs, I feel like it has a better feel, but a lot of these feel a little bit too slow just from a prototype standpoint. But I do. I do like. I like this kind of layout. I think the typeface is a little bit too light. It feels a little bit like it could use a little more weight. This one feels a little bit better, I think, because of the dark background and the light text on the dark background makes it feel like there's more contrast. So sometimes if you're on a lighter background, you need to thicken the weight a little bit, and it really just Depends on the typeface too, but to make it stand out. Alright, let's go to the next one. Timothy, put some stuff on Twitter. I looked at this one and I wanted to pull it up because I just thought the motion was cool. Like spinning the planets around on an axis. The moon, space station. That's pretty sweet and creative. I think the type could use a little bit of love. Like on this section right here, it's all of this feels just a touch cramped. Maybe maybe these titles should be a little smaller and Mars should be larger. Not sure. Like the hierarchy seems a little bit weird. And I'm also never a big fan of, of these buttons just floating on top of everything. I know that that's kind of a Google thing to do, but I always like to put like a container or a background behind it and if it's gonna be fixed at the bottom, I think the text flying over it or flying under it to me and maybe it's just a subjective thing that it always feels like I wanna like a place for that button to live instead of floating in outer space. Okay, this was pretty cool. By Nitin. Nitin. Not sure how to say that. I just thought it was interesting. Like he used this like framer VR pattern which lets you spin around. I think the design overall could use some work, but I just, I thought it was kind of cool how he put this in VR. So I wanted to show that. Okay. Christy Christie Roofs on Dribble. This is kind of an interesting. I just, I like the like the really stark and contrast, black and white and blue. These are cool. Like touch id, voice recognition. This is all cool. I will say just in terms of like, just from a general app design standpoint, you know, you typically wouldn't want someone to log in or sign up. From the very first experience of that, you want to give them something before you ask. You want to give a user some value before you ask for something in return. And there's maybe there's some other screens on here. You know, maybe they could explore before they find it, before they have to log in. I feel like some of this text is a little heavy up in here. Some of these other screens that has a lot of negative space but then it gets really cramped kind of down in here. Okay, I'm going to go pull up. Andrea or Andrea. Andrea. Not sure how to say that one spaced got these kind of angled things here. Let's see if I can pull up. I don't mind the angled stuff, but at the same time it's like if I really want to check out the app. I need to kind of do this. This is that kind of floating button again. I don't know why. Like, this one's got a little white gradient behind it and I actually like that one a lot better because it has like this fixed background, whereas this one for some reason maybe doesn't. I like the typeface for titles, but I feel like this typeface doesn't work well for Body Copy. It just feels almost like a Euro style kind of. It just doesn't have a good flow to it. With Body Copy, in my opinion, a lot of these headlines. I feel like this screen looks pretty good. Could use a little hierarchy adjustment, but I think that's in the right direction. This looks cool. Okay, here's another. Just thought this was a cool little interactive prototype. The design I feel like, is not as great on this one. I think, like the text is really small and there's nothing on this that there's no like big standout graphic. I do like these screens, actually. I like these screens better than the ones he put in the prototype. Like the moon right here and Mars. Like that feels like more compelling. I'm not sure if I like the picture within a picture as much, but these screens feel a little bit better. And I also think that these user. I like the way you're putting out this user flow stuff, but it also feels a little bit confusing because I'm like, okay, this is kind of going up here. Oh, that's a swipe. This is going up here. Oh, that's a tap. Maybe, Maybe tap. Actually, you know, maybe you put that swipe button on top of the moon instead of the circle and you use each one of those icons in place of the circle that you're using. Alright, I gotta hurry up. I gotta hurry this up because I got a lot to go through. I actually already went through this one. Oh, and this one from Martha. I actually thought the brief and the kind of case study she put on Behinds Behance. Behance looks better than the app design. Like, all right, so look at the light typography here. Discover strange new worlds. But then check this out. Like, look at that Gotham Light Gotham book. Like, this is set really nicely and these icons and all this negative space around that and then these colors, like that whole area right in there feels really good. For whatever reason, you know, sometimes you just have to move things around until it feels good. Whereas the top part of the app, it just, it feels like it's lacking a little bit and it is Hard to prescribe, like, a quick fix because you do have to move stuff around, but something in here is, like, really working. I just wanted to contrast that because. All right, anyway, moving right along. Luke made this thing on Twitter. Just another cool little motion prototype. And I like the way that he did this, like, book of pass. Call to action down here. Let's see if I can get back. So it is a floating button, but he's got the gradient to kind of, like, anchor it down at the bottom. And I like the way that when you hit book a pass, like, some more stuff happens right in. Come on. Here we go. We're gonna book it right there. So it goes. It's like, okay, let's go. It shows you some confirmation stuff. Anyway, I thought that was neat. Okay. This is from Spila. Or Spila. I'm not sure. At first glance, like, this looks pretty cool. And then, like, when I get in a little bit more, I don't know if it's the rounded rectangles with a shadow. It. It does just this. This screen. It just feels a little bit cramped. And again, I don't know. I don't know how to. You know, there's no real good prescriptive quick fix other than maybe, you know, like, just make. Make these titles a little bit larger. Maybe the. The stars are too small. I think that might be part of it. Like, the stars are too small, and then that 928 and the 2K, maybe that's, like, the rating number that feels a little bit too tiny and kind of crammed into that space right in here on this cta. Like, I don't like the way that book now is kind of competing with this gradient. It kind of gets lost a little bit. And these check marks feel a slightly bit. A little bit too light. And some of this feels a little bit cramped in here, and then kind of the same thing for that. And I feel like this body copy could be maybe, like, a lighter weight. It feels a little bit heavy. But overall, the composition and the layout, I think, is nice, and it's headed in the right direction. But it could use a little bit of tweak to kind of, you know, bring it up to the next level. All right, let's go to Yaroslav. Everybody likes these, like, floating bottom. These, like, floating bottom buttons. And again, some of my same critique. I don't love the way that just kind of hides the content. But on. On his prototype, I thought it was cool the way he had Mars, Earth, Europa. I don't know if the stacked. The stacked concept is working because it visually and, like, motion metaphor, like nothing else is doing that. So it almost feels, like, out of place. Maybe if the. If the. If the planets or the places were coming in at the same perspective, maybe that would make a little more sense. But it feels a little bit out of place on that one. But I think the typography is nice on this one, but I think the bottom. The bottom area feels like it could use a little bit of work because you're showing some of the overview and the text, but it's all hidden behind that button. This one was really cool by Rosvan Razvan. I just thought this was really neat, the motion that he put in, like, the way it's like, masking out and masking back in as you swipe between the two. I just thought it was really neat. You know, there's not much of a booking component here, but I just like the. This motion concept and even the way the little pagination dots are animating right there as well. I just think that's cool. Okay. I wanted to bring this one up because I think this one is. It's like a clean layout, but it also just does not feel like space travel. It feels like, you know, like a gardening magazine because of the green and the white and everything is very, very light. There's not much contrast here, and it just starts to feel really, really muddy. So I just wanted to bring this in because I actually think that if you change the colors in the typeface and maybe let some of this stuff down here breathe a little bit more, I think that could be. It could turn into a nice design. I even like the icon for the little, like, spaced hamburger menu. But I think just the general. In general, the art direction on this one is just not quite there, just because it doesn't. If you stand back and squint at that, it doesn't say, like, space travel. Okay. I need to. All right, this one here by Marco J. This is really cool. I really like the time here. Like, it's very clear. I think the hierarchy is great from Earth to Mars. And it kind of has these, like, the perspective of, like, the way you're going to travel and the stars in there, like, select dates. Like, it's very, very clear what I need to do here. I'm already. I've already chosen Earth to Mars somehow, and I'm going to go select dates. So this is just, like, a really nice screen, in my opinion. And maybe the from and destination, maybe you could have, like, A subtle blue tint in the gray color. But overall I thought this was a pretty cool little concept. This is one by Yaroslav. I just thought this was cool because it had, it had like the in flight view, like while you're looking at your phone, maybe in the rocket or wherever, and it's showing like you're going 14,000 miles per hour. And then you can kind of see these views from outside and you can see the route. I just thought that was interesting concept. I think visually it could be maybe a little tighter with some of the graphics here, but I do like the concept a lot. All right, this one from Sam Atmore. This is pretty interesting. So like when it starts off, it goes from like the book now is like a white cta, so it's loading up and I click on the moon and then I've got like a white book now cta, which is kind of interesting. Click on that and now like that expands and I have a fine flights area that's pretty interesting. Like a double CTA that expands. But there's like a new CTA color that's even more. I don't like the way this is like rounded into like a big giant weird button. Maybe if that was. If the book now was like a gray button on. On that white background and the white background was like flat across, I think that would look a little bit better and if those numbers were a little bit larger. And I don't know if I love the rounded rectangle images. A lot of people use a of lot, lot of those little images in like that rounded rectangle form. And I'm just not so sure if that works very well in mobile. But I do love this concept of like the double CTA that expands into another style. I think that's pretty smart. Okay, this one was pretty neat. This was by Joey Lamonto. I think all of this, like looks really good. It looks nice and clean. It's got like, seems like a good flow, you know, like a lot of the type is really nice. The colors are good, good typefaces. My only problem with this one is it feels like almost like a kid's book. And I think it's because of the color and the illustration of the planet. It's more of like a gradient and the typeface used like this with this kind of like orangey gray. You know, it's not a gray but like a light orange and then like light purple. Purple and orange. Like it looks good, the colors look great, but it feels more like a kid's app. Or something like, it doesn't feel like I'm about to give you a lot of money to take me to Mars. This more feels like, you know, like a children's museum kind of app. And I think that's something that is important to like really nail down the art direction before you get started. But this also could be subjective. You know, people might think this is great and they would trust this app to take them to Mars. I would feel more like, I don't know, it just feels. I don't know. Who knows? I could just be. I could be wrong. Alright, so now I want to share my top three. After digging through all of these, these are the top three that stood out to me the most. Number one is this app by Suraj Kumar. He didn't put a ton of screens. I mean, he does have a few other shots. Actually, I'll pull those up as well. But to me, for whatever reason, I remembered this shot and I don't know if it's because it was mostly all black, of which I'm a very big fan. I don't know why I like black on black so much. And actually this is even black. This is like charcoal gray, this matte black, but it just looks so good. And these like subtle purple drop shadows and just the way that you can't even see where the app and the phone kind of like separates. It just feels kind of futuristic to me. And the type display, just like in general, this is like a really cool shot. And I love the way he used the moon and earth with like the nice big image right there with these like, I think the variants of hierarchy, like the big moon with like the really small text for the booking section and even this calendar, like just. It just looked really good. And these like very, extremely clear call to actions where it's just like this big blob of blue at the bottom with the arrow and even like right there that just. Ah, it looks so good. Good job, Siraj. Some of the other shots of his though, like this one, these feel like they fall a little bit short. I don't know if it's because. Because there's not the cool device in there to make it look better, but these kind of feel a little bit muddy and the type feels like it could use a little bit more work. Like maybe the. Maybe these are a little bit larger with slightly less letter spacing. Also I just noticed that availability is misspelled. And maybe in these the background is like black instead. And even this one whoops. Like this screen looks pretty Good. But maybe because these two are further back, maybe he should have made those a little bit darker and this, because right now, like, especially if you're trying to do this atmosphere, like, atmosphere perspective kind of thing, the background should be a little bit darker, and it's just kind of getting lost. All right, next one would be this crazy shot from Joshua. I don't even know what to say about this. Like, if you look at the GIF that he posted, it's just like he went all out. Like, let me see if I can pull up this. This MP4 here. So, like, starting off, he's got explore top travel locations, and then, like, the price in bitcoin, which I think is pretty funny. But then as you tap it, you go into this VR thing and he's got the phone rotating. This is just insane that he did all this. This was just, like, really impressive. Sorry. So we're scheduling our trip. You know, like, he went all out. You're selecting your dates, your time. You hit your seats again. This is like another double CTA thing, which I think is really smart. You hit children, Bitcoin, Apple Pay with your bitcoin scan face ID complete. I just think it's pretty cool. It just, like, was really impressive. I was like, holy crap. This is. This is a lot of work. So good job. Lastly, I think this app by Lucas Spark. Spark. Not sure if that's how you say that, but this just looks awesome. Like, it just looks really cool. The white and the black with the hint of the orange color. I feel like it's, like, right on with the creative brief. The type is, like, really nicely set. I like these, like, all caps, and I really love the way that he's used this, like, ticket format. I think that's just, like, really cool. It kind of has a little bit of a flavor of, like, old school skeuomorphism, but it's still, like, it doesn't feel old school. It's just, like, really subtle. So I think that was a really clever way to handle that. So, yeah, I think maybe some of this type could be slightly different. Like, it looks like they're all set. Like, your safest journey to the moon. And Mr. Dan Petty is the same size. I don't know if I mind that or if it needs to be a little bit different, but overall, I like it. I think the only thing I could critique here is that this 12 to 18, this is stuff that's already been selected. And then next is the exact same style as 12 and 18, and the same style as new. So new and Next have the exact same style, but Next is like the very, very like should be the clearest call to action. So maybe that should have been orange with black text or maybe the entire bottom should be black. That said, next, same way that he's got total price right here, but even right there. So like if you did a full black background with the white button that screams like this is what you need to push to finalize. And maybe the orange and black work better as like a secondary call to action. But then at the same time he's got that same style as these little title tabs and just looking at it, it doesn't bother me. But I think just in terms from like a usability perspective, I don't know, it's. You would want to go that far with a critique on a concept. But overall I just thought these are really cool. Alright, that's it for the Spaced Challenge review. Remember, I was only doing the app design. There's going to be other videos for the logo review and for the homepage review, so definitely check those out. I'll put links to the videos to those reviews by Pablo Stanley and Charlie Marie down below as they're available. And good luck winning the Space Challenge contest. And if you're going to be at Winter Work Week in about a week and a half or so, definitely let me know. I'd love to meet you. Until next time. I'll see you in the next video Sat.