Just The Thicket — Growing those Visual Design Skills

Creating 4 pages for a community gardening app

Nathan Davey

4 min readDec 8, 2020

Overview

The brief was to create an app for gardening enthusiasts, allowing them to connect, learn and share tips & tricks.

The deliverables:

Onboarding page(s)
Product page
Navigation system(s) for users to find their way around the app
User profile page

Considering brand values and giving my gardening app some personality

My first port of call was to collate 5 key words to define my brand values. These would help frame my app in a way that would resonate with my target users. Direct and indirect competitor research helped in forming the following:

Using these brand values, I created 5 “goldilocks” statements to provide my app with a brand personality:

Community focused by not obtrusive
Serene but not dull
Warm but not overbearing
Discovering but not boastful
Caring but not nauseating

Mood boards would help shape the apps identity

I’d never created a mood board before and so getting to grips with producing one would be a challenge, but I felt ready.

Websites including Pinterest, Unsplash and Dribbble put my worries at ease. As it turned out, creating mood boards was great fun and an extremely useful tool for gaining inspiration for the aesthetic feel, colours, layouts and typography for the app.

Word Association

Mood boards complete, I used a process of word association to help gain inspiration for potential icons, logos and my app name — “Just the Thicket”.

Wireframes version 1

I commenced with the onboarding screens. My idea was to provide images of a bud growing into a flower, signifying the learning path the user would experience by using the app.

Onboarding screens — seeing a bud grow into a flower

I then proceeded to the navigation, product page and user profile.

Feedback

User feedback included the following:

The burger menu and logo looked lost and the search bar could be incorporated into the bottom nav bar.
The colour gradient on the ‘Forum Discussion’ from white to red was distracting and difficult to read.
The logo came across as childish and not in-keeping with the brand values.

Final layout

Based on the feedback, I made changes.

The logo was updated.
Altered the colours for the onboarding to provide a warmer and calming feel.
Redesigned the product page to break information into digestible amounts and enhance the aesthetic look.

Round Two of Feedback

Changes made, testing showed that users liked:

Overall aesthetics.
Use of visual elements on the product page to represent key information.
The originality of the ‘growing and learning’ onboarding screens.

Users disliked:

The ‘weird’ gradient used on the user profile. My idea for this was inspired by my mood board of sunsets and warm appeal, however it ended up confusing people.
The navigation page didn’t appear in-keeping with the rest of the design as there was a lack of colour.

Next steps

Redesign the navigation page.
Change the colours of the user profile.
Explore other options to include within the user profile, without overwhelming the layout.

Conclusion

A great start to visual design. I was able to learn so many new skills using Sketch in such a short space of time, being able to create mood boards based around my brand personality and create an app for gardening enthusiasts.

Key Learnings

Colour theory — I’m a massive fan of the psychology of using colour. Being able to enhance my knowledge and use it to my advantage was thoroughly enjoyable.
Mood boards — Having never used mood boards before, I was dubious of their usefulness at the beginning. As it turned out, they were an incredibly useful tool when it came to designing the layout and feel for the app.

Please feel free to reach out and contact me on LinkedIn if you enjoyed this!