Developing and Merging two skills together - Geometric Glyph Art Transformed into a UI

Intro

Design is such a passion of mine and the strangest thing is it has never been more apparent to me than this year until after deploying my first application, it suddenly hit me, this is what I want to do. It all started when I decided to delve further into learning how to design with adobe illustrator after finding this book called Designa: Technical Secrets of the Traditional Visual Arts. I took me into the world of design from Celtic patterns to the Islamic designs of ancient times drastically changing my perspective on what applications could look like. More importantly something just clicked in my brain, and I became more aware of the basics shapes that make up everything in the world around us. I want my designs to be artfully created first but I also want them to serve a practical purpose, so I decided, why not convert these designs into a UI. Most applications are made in a very boxed formatted set fixed to fit mobile devices, but with AR coming into the mix, there will be no limit in how we express the boundaries of our applications so I figure why don’t it change the traditional outer shape from a square into a circle and thus my set of Glyph circle applications.

The Illustrator Drafts

I started by finding inspiration online to get the base idea of how I’m going to design this clock. Essentially ripping images, re-vecotorizing them while adding me on color scheme and designs and restyling them until I got a look that I was going for.

There were A LOT of changes lol but I realized it can’t just look artful and complex, it has to be functional it has to be useable.

The Final Draft

After draft after draft I finally Came to the final Design. I was very please with the look, its exactly how I wanted it to appear. The next step was implementing the design as a UI.

Soooooo....many.....drafts/notes and headaches....from design to code markup

It wasn’t until making the design word in the UI till I realized there were going to be another hundred edits to the look that would have to be made. XAML the markup language of choice wasn’t too fond of my love to make things glow and I’m still learning the in’s and outs of the combo of XAML and C# so I decided to take it out. There were also a vast amount of issues I ran into requiring me to take a crap ton of screenshots to scribble notes as I keep in mind what I can and can’t do.

The Deployment Version (Final version kinda…It’s going to need updates lol)

This took me about 5 months on and off before I decided to give the initial launch. I took advantage of the countless tutorials out there to learn how to design in illustrator and I cut and edited open source code and put it all together to make my own personal master piece that I can build upon. Not bad for a self taught self proclaimed “Junior Glyph Circle UI Software Architect” ha ha. Just you wait I’ll be a master at this style of work soon enough! If you’re interested in checking out the application leave a comment and I’ll send you a promo code to download it, otherwise if you’d like to support me on my journey donate by upvoting this post, commenting or you can buy it, either way I’ll send it to you for free if you ask, I just want you’re opinion on my work (go easy on me guys...I'm still learning). I plan to make more of them and as my skills improve, so will these. Keep an eye out for me and thanks for reading if you took the time too.

Without further ado...adieu? I introduce to you Tunc Circulus, your basic analog clock with a passionate design.

P.S. Also, sorry for what may be an insane amount of grammatical/punctuation errors, I'm severely dyslexic (true but an excuse, I'm just a bad writer...) and I can only read over my errors so many times before losing my mind (I'm also ADD). It takes me FOREVER to post a blog. Image my struggle learning how to code (dear gawd...), but hey that's me. Passionate about the journey, excited for the destination.

Cheers,

- Druid Cruize