Research Week 07

The next part of this project was creating a banking app to serve alongside the brand. Rather than create an app from scratch, I took screens from a pre-existing banking app and redesigned it with my brand, as this was about applying my brand rather than a whole app design. I chose the Ulsterbanks app, as it was the banking app I use most and I think it has a good design for a non-modern bank.

My first step was to take screenshots of the screens of the app and create an interface inventory, by pulling the screens apart into separate components and grouping them. This would make creating my banking app much easier.

I found it particularly interesting to see just how many components make up an app like this and this has made me appreciate the complexity of creating an app that is both extremely functional while still being visually pleasing.

With the interface inventory complete I began redesigning components to fit my brand.

The initial hurdle I ran into was the nav bar icons. At first, I tried creating icons from the shapes of the logo but felt they looked a bit clumsy and wouldn’t work well on a small scale. I wanted to keep some aspect of the logo so that these icons would feel like a unique set, so instead kept them somewhat blocky and rounded one corner of each icon more than the others, similar to how the arms of the logo have one corner more rounded. I was pleased with this as allowed me to create very functional icons which still had unique aspects that made them feel personal to the brand.

Next, I moved on to redesigning the other components. While working off preexisting assets, I made sure to add as much of my own brand into the components, for example using more square shapes throughout the components.

The biggest problem I ran into here was colour balancing. I initially thought yellow would be the prominent colour similar to how it was in the Brand Rollout, but for this which is a more official and informative part of the brand, I felt using yellow sparingly worked best.

While this part of the project was to just redesign the components of a banking app, I decided to change the layout and purpose of some of the screens to better fit my brand.

On the home screen, I added a digital representation of a bank card, which would allow users to view their card details through the app. I thought this would be a good addition as it would help users not have to carry a physical card with them as they’d have the ability to pay through Apple/Google Pay and see their card details through the app. Also, the digital card would have the same unique pattern as the user's physical card.