Designing and redesigning Storybox

After going through the process of developing a concept and initial design for the cross-generational social network 'storybox', I decided to rework the final design and give it some finishing touches. Because we worked on the project with four different people with equal sharing of roles and responsibilities, it meant that the design was compromised through our different tastes and opinions. The result was great and worked really well, however it didn't live up to my personal ambition. The improvements that I made was mainly in the colour palette and the logo. I made minor improvements to the timeline and general navigation.

I dropped the black/white/red colour palette that we previously decided on and chose one that was closer to our original inspiration, an old attic where a box filled with stories was found:

The sharp corners were rounded off and make the website appear smoother, less technical and more welcoming. I felt that the long discussed logo was lacking something. The ligature was a good idea and communicates the concept and identity of storybox well, but adding a traditional hedera was just that little bit that was missing. The hedera or aldus leaf is a stylised ivy leaf and one of the oldest typographic ornaments. It was traditionally used to seperate paragraphs in long documents. Today it is rarely seen but still carries literary connotations of books and stories. It was pointed out that it might look too similar to the logo of the popular publishing house Hermann Schmidt. However, I don't think the target audience of storybox is likely to make this connection since this pulisher is targeted at a German speaking designer audience (which is why it was pointed out in the first place). The ivy leaf gives the logo a warm, ornamental and friendly character and appears in other parts of the website too.

The project got marked with a B+ which is equivalent to a 2.1 in England or a 2+ in Germany. The final design and an animated prototype demo can be viewed here.