Character Customisation

Customisation of the characters are vital they mean two things. Firstly, each user has a completely different style frog, and secondly to gain access to the customisations, they must engage in certain experiences. This is something that has been important from the beginning of the experience planning. It is at the state that now I have an intuitive user interface that I can start developing the characterisation of the frogs.

Colour

In the character customisation, I want as much customisation as possible for each user so to begin with, each user can customise the colour palette of their frog, it is only at the beginning of the experience that they can do this though. The frogs were initally designed from their real life counterparts, but the colour palettes should be interchangable. Therefore, below are the frogs and their colour palettes;

Then below are the real life frogs that I used for the new colour palettes;

06 Dec 2011 — Strawberry Poison Dart Frog (Oophaga pumilio), Guayacan, Costa Rica — Image by © Robert Pickett/Visuals Unlimited/Corbis

So here are the new colour palettes;

and here are all the frogs in the differen colour palettes;

 

This means instead of having 5 different frogs, with the addition of 10 new colour choices and an overall total of 15 colour palettes there can be a total of 75 variations of frogs.

Accessories

Next I wanted to allow accessories to be added to the frogs to ensure they could be truly customised, the items which they could use would be collected as they use the experience.

The first stage of choosing the accessories was purchasing a pack of themed people from around the world. Next I had to choose the countries I had the background artwork for. This was done in Illustrator as you can see below the characters, the list of countries and the actual countries chosen along the top of the file.

Next I took these characters to a new file and organised them a little neater. Meet all the characters and the accesories I needed.

Next I started to pick apart the characters themselves and the items that could be used for the frog characters. This is what I was left with;

This means to add to the 75 variations of styles from the colour stage, by adding 33 accessories, there were now 2,475 variations of customisations.

Scene

Last but not least, to ensure every users experience was entirely different, I introduced the idea of a scene, this meant that the users profile would show a ‘scene’ of that users frog. The backdrop would be the imagery of the location the user last visited/currently visiting while online, along with the frog and all it’s accessories. These backdrops can be seen below.

This meant that by adding 21 backdrops to the current total variations of 2,475 scenes, there could now be a total of 51,975 different scenes for the users. This number would only grow with time and the addition of new places and accessories.

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Google’s Arts & Cultures App

Google created a service for learning about arts and cultures online. It is a fantastic tool to learn about many of the different categories from ‘Artists’ to ‘Historical Figures’.

The homepage introduces the user to the site with a banner image explaining the site, and gives them a ‘Daily digest’ consisting of intersting subjects.

Along the left tab you have partners, who are the people responsible for providing Google with the content;

Once you have selected the subject you want to look at, the site gives you a description along with the different exhibits about that subject;

Once an exhibit has been chosen, the site uses images and text to portray information about the subject to the user, as can be seen below;

Artists are shown similarly with a slight difference. The artists are listed alphabetically or by a time format in a timeline.

Again, selecting a specific artist allows you to read a short description about them and then also view their work.

The same is shown also for Hostorical Events and Public Figures as shown below;

What is very interesting is the places section is broken down into popular areas that can be explored inside by looking at images, 360 degree videos and documents about the area.

What is also very interesting is the Google homepage advertised a specific part of history on their homepage with a link to their cultures site, this was interesting to note as it enticed a large demographic of users into the service. Featuring certain days on the homepage of my site could do exactly the same thing.

The site was also fully optimised for mobile;