Rowan Simpson posted an interesting exercise this morning:

TIP: pick four icons at random and imagine the iPhone app that has those icons in the tab bar thenounproject.com (let's hear your ideas)

The following is a result of my spending two hours on it.

Picking the icons

The Noun Project utilises infinite scrolling for displaying icons so I thought that a better (and more fun) method was to generate four random IDs and work with thouse icons. Currently there are 712 icons so this is the search string I used at Random.org

They still haven't sorted out a proper 'new tab' page for when you click on an icon, instead relying on a modal box but you can basically plug those numbers into the following URL pattern to get your icons: http://thenounproject.com/modal/XXX/

Random.org spat out the IDs for a kidney, hopital, fast food and ethernet.

 

Prototyping the app in two hours

Initial ideas included a 'How much fast food can I eat before I need a hospital and where is the nearest goddang one with wifi?!'. The kidney-hospital-fast food connection was easy enough but the ethernet icon really threw a spanner in the works.

Instead of staying stuck, I threw the icons on Balsamiq to see where it'll take me instead.

I decided in the end to treat the ethernet as a graphical representation of something else and ended up with an app for a kidney mishap recovery patient that syncs with their physician's offices.

This gives the patient an overview of their sodium level, list of medication to take, a recommended menu and tracks appointments.

If you have Balsamiq, you can download the project files here (218KB).

Comments s'il vous plaît?

 

My mother used to bring back old copies of UK newspapers, especially the Sunday papers. It was a right treat because they were thicker than my school textbooks but more importantly, they have a proper kids' section.

I cut the parts that interested me the most and laid them up in this notebook. This is my second earliest memory of my taking an interest in graphic design even though I didn't realise it at the time.