Emotional Design - Love

According to a book, "It's up to the designer to choose fonts for their designs that will effectively deliver the layout's message" (241).

The purpose of this project was to work alone or with a partner to think about a common object. I decided to work with a partner, April Cargill, and we chose the common object of keys. The next step in this project was to form that common object to an emotion. April and I decided to use the emotion, "love" in hopes of delivering the message 'CampusCrush101 is the KEY to your relationship problems'.

Below is the original photo and our design and message:

April and I used two different design softwares: PowerPoint and Photoshop. We used PowerPoint to create a key from scratch. We modeled our key off of the original image. We simply used various shapes in PowerPoint such as rectangles, squares, and hearts. Once we had a finished product of the key, we implemented it into Photoshop. We first created the black background and added a shadow to it to enhance design. We then created two new layers for the blue and pink key. After that we used the magic eraser to hollow out the hearts on the top of the keys. We then added even more effects to the keys in which we added an outer glow to the edges. Continuing in our work we decided to use the distort and twirl tool to mold the two keys together. As you can see the keys are not straight, they have bends and flexibility. Still not satisfied with the picture we experimented with a tool we were not familiar with, which is the puppet tool. The puppet tool was very useful to us because we could simply click on certain spots of the keys to manipulate the curves and bends in a way that makes the keys look intertwined. The puppet tool truly makes the keys look more like the emotion 'love' because they are two separate entities as one image, much like a couple in love. We chose this emotional appeal because we are currently working on our very successful relationship advice website called CampusCrush101. April and I are working hard on providing honest advice to college kids going through dating frustrations. The keys signify that CampusCrush is the key for all of your questions and opinions on college dating. I personally enjoyed working on this project as it is something I am highly interested in. 

Please feel free to check out our site or ask questions about your dating life at Ask April!