Concept

What is your design journey?

Constellation, a concept tied with navigation and fate, sheds light on the unique backgrounds and creative interests of designers. Amidst a comforting and whimsical atmosphere, we delve into the diverse and sometimes roundabout paths designers have taken to be where they are now.

01. Home

Explore Constellations

Filter through diverse constellations made by designers.

02. Survey

Create Your Own

Take the survey to add your unique input to a growing dataset.

03. Learn

View Profiles

Learn about each unique constellation in detail. Discover how a designer has weaved his or her journey over time.

Design System

Visual Identity

The magical and celestial mood is portrayed through the high stroke contrast in the header typefaces Wagon and Kaisei Decol with occasional pops of color on a  black and white palette.

Design Process

Data Research

Initially, we were curious about what are the leading factors of high satisfaction among designers. We explored various data categories like salary, location, work hours, and more, in order to find relationships and trends.

Context Framing

Concept Development

Our group strived to bring forth a participatory design that allows users to leave their mark in the dataset and view the macro aspect of our design community. Among various ideas, we moved forward with constellations due to its flexibility in form and unique metaphor of time and fate.

Process

Form Creation

A challenge we faced was trying to visually represent data without creating too much complexity while decoding the constellations. After numerous iterations, we eventually came to a simple form flexible enough to create variation, along with a logical system that can be decoded with ease.

Data Visualization

Constellation System

Ultimately, we selected data points that portrayed steps of a designer's journey, including how one entered design, number of jobs, salary, work hours, current design discipline, work satisfaction, future plans, and more.

Web Coding

Implementation

Implementation was a great challenge as our concept involved numerous capabilities with data. We used Airtable as the core database to store existing and new user inputs and Replit for live collaboration. Through the programming process, we had to balance design and development feasibility, so we explored other solutions that would be both feasible and compelling.

Reflection

This project was a good exercise on how to present data in a creative, yet approachable way––a reframing of data representation, veering away from the conventional methods of a pie charts, line graphs, or bar diagrams. If more time were to be given, we want to explore more web interaction such as allowing users to find their constellation among other constellations on the home screen. Another feature that will allows users to prolong their experience on the site would be the ability to compare their constellation with their friends possibly through account creation on the website.