People travel for various reasons, such as experiencing new cultures, trying different foods, and gaining a fresh perspective on life. It can also provide opportunities for personal growth, adventure, and creating lasting memories with loved ones.
As time passes, our memories can fade and we may forget things that we don't want to forget, including travel memories.
🤔 The Challenge: How might we preserve memories about travel?
The application allows users to quickly and easily capture travels of any scale — from visiting a village to a multi-countries journey, without any graphic design experience.
n the summer of 2020, I took an online course that taught me to create illustrated maps. I like illustrated maps, but there are two potential problems: maps created by someone do not have a strong personal significance as they don't reflect the experience, and creating maps takes time, effort, equipment, and some drawing skills. At this stage, as I knew the process of creating a map, I wanted to make it easier and more accessible so that more people would enjoy their illustrated maps like me.
I created the first concept of the product. It would be a mobile application that would make travel maps and would reply on the community as a source of illustrations. My target users would be social media and “aesthetic” things lovers who do not have any graphic design experience.
Upon receiving feedback from both my Professor and one user interview, I further developed and improved the concept of my product. In addition to creating aesthetic images, I wanted the application to delve deeper into the theme of preserving travel memories. As part of the course requirement, I had to choose a company to develop the product under, and I ultimately chose Google due to its abundant resources, the most relevant being Google Photos and Google Maps.
My challenge was to create a map with good composition while requiring minimal effort from the user. Instead of using illustrations, I opted for photos, and had to find a way to arrange them on the map. Through several iterations with mockups, I decided to automate the process of formatting photos into different sized circles and applying a filter on top.
However, the next challenge was figuring out how to create a map base without drawing. After searching for solutions, I came across Mapbox, a tool that allows users to create custom online maps for websites and applications. I chose the color pink for my map, based solely on my personal association with the trip.
To maintain map cohesion and create the illusion of a "hand-drawn" map, I decided to include small illustrations of city elements in the maps created by the application, similar to those used in illustrated maps. To make this idea sustainable, I planned to create several sets of illustrative elements that could cover all types of projects.
To ensure the user could see all the details without the map being too overwhelming, I decided to make the completed project A5 size when printed. The frame would provide context for the trip and give a feeling of completeness to the overall design
I started out with low-fidelity sketches to demonstrate how the whole application would work based on the concept I created earlier.
In the second iteration, I used default components and styles from the Material Design Library which is a design system used by Google.
Later, I customized those components according to the branding I developed. In the beginning, the application would have only one style, but later would be expanded to multiple themes with its colors and illustrations (for example, a theme with shades of pink).
