Today was a productive day. I’ve begun to flush out the final design in Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop. I’m using Photoshop to draw out the initial sketches and using Illustrator to “turn” it into a vector image.
My original idea consisted of having four highways. Two of them would be curved and three of them would have perspective. As I began to draw, I ran into problems with the curve of highway. Imagine having to draw a curve that had grid lines with perspective. It is doable in Photoshop but not very easy to do in Illustrator.
After spending the whole afternoon, drawing, pondering, and sketching; I’ve decided to forgo the perspective and do a straight up aerial shot. Therefore, when looking at the highways, you would be looking straight down at them.
I’ve decided to do this for a number of reasons.
First, I wanted the highways that are straight and curved. If I wanted to keep perspective, all the highways would be straight with no curve.
Second, if I kept the original design, placement of the events (with the pictures) on the “grid” might cause more problems in regards of coding.
Lastly, time constraint. I have only 9 more weeks left to implement a prototype. The keyword is prototype. As much as I want to have the perspective, it’s just not feasible. Besides, I know there are other and more efficient ways of drawing the curve with perspective. I will look into it for version 1.1!
In case you aren’t aware, I do have plans on turning this into a real working application at some point in the future.
It’s also important to note that in the original design, there would be a “billboard” on the Day View that would cycle through all the events. I will keep this idea.
A quick list of things to be done within the next two weeks:
- Finish up Final Design work (to be done by this Sunday 3/16)
- Draw all the views
- Draw in fake events to ensure that it will work
- Prep the 4 highways to be imported into Flash/Flex
- Post final design to blog
- Programming (to be done by Thursday 3/19)
- Begin pseudocode
- Figure out what classes are needed and how it will be structured