PPP3 // STUDIO VISIT - MARAID DESIGN

Today I visited Maraid, a web design studio run by Jane Mcdevitt and Richard Claxton. Based In the centre of York Maraid specialise in the area of digital design, an area in which I have the most interest in. The reason for the visit was to gather feedback on my portfolio as well as current work; feedback from a studio that works and understand digital design and the key process within its core. This type of feedback is valuable and often hard to come by if asking for it within crits within uni. As I'm one of a handful of people specialising in digital, it makes it hard to gather sufficient, critical and constructive feedback on the type of work I produce. A lot off people look from a style/aesthetic point of view and not from a user journey perspective which often leads to people shaking their heads up and down while saying "Yeah, I love it". What I want more of is "how would you user get from point 'a' to point 'b'?." This is the type of feedback I was hoping for from Maraid.

In my time there, I presented three projects. The feedback was more of a discussion of my thought process and the conceptual idea behind the game more than 'change this and that' approach and this helped me so much. We discussed at length about my 'related' music game and how I could take it further in terms of actually making the game and who I could talk too.  The iWatch project when down very well. It was the only project that was half finished, so it was beneficial to get their feedback and thoughts about the grid/pattern concept. They both loved it and suggested trying to demonstrate what the user has to do as they might not understand the functionality of the pattern concept straight away so might become confused.

After presenting my work Andy and Jane introduced me to Andy Gibson from Team Pesky. Andy works in the office next door and develops apps and console games from Playstation all the way to VR. Andy sat down with me and discussed what I wanted to do after my degree and how I could go about getting my 'related' music app developed. First, he talked through the game and talked about the things I should be looking to and not focus too much on the design by really understanding the mechanics and functionality of the game because if you crack the functionality and make the game as seamless and efficient enough then it's that, that makes an app a success. After he told me about a few sites that I could look into if I wanted to build the game myself such as Game Maker and Unity but also told me about a game developer company called 'Game Toast' a community of gaming developers who do monthly meetups in Leeds where they gather and discuss what they've been working on in terms of ideas and the development of these ideas. Andy offered to introduce me if I ever wanted to attend one of these meet ups.


Overall, Andy from Team Pesky was extremely valuable for my progression. It's the first time where I felt that I'm actually getting somewhere with trying to get one of my apps developed and with the help and guidance of Maraid they also gave me beneficial feedback and provided me with a few contacts who are also app developers which I'm going to look into.