We had the distinct pleasure to interview award winning designer Dingzhou Li about their original and creative News Reader Web App design work. Dingzhou Li is an award-winning communication designer, that makes our world a better place with their original news reader web app works.
Dingzhou Li ("DL") answered Design Interview ("DI") questions about their award-winning work 9News News Reader Web App. Interview questions prepared by Frank Scott.
DL : I would like to connect geometrical shapes with emotional element. I believe every single shape could represent something which is much more than what it looks like. How to get people's reading preference with a innovative way, that is what I want to prob for this project.
DL : Typography and consistency. For 9News, a easy-to-use web app with excellent readability and high performance is what I especially want to achieve throughout the project. The black square shapes as seen in the logo is a key element for the whole app.
DL : 9News is my degree project for my bachelor degree of computer graphic design at University of Waikato in 2014. As a degree project, I think it meets my expectation well, and express my idea and understanding of design in ingenious way.
DL : I spent about 3 month on this project. About 1 month on ideation, research and visual design, and the rest time for development and revise.
DL : 9News is my degree project as I said. When I was a university student, I believe university is the most valuable place for a young designer to explore the digital world. 9News is a conceptual design, and I believe it made it.
DL : The design is being developed by myself. However, as a conceptual design, the function for this web app is quite simple and subjective, and I intent to produce it for myself.
DL : The target audience is young people, especially for 18-26 male, because they are rational, creative and interested in trendy news. They also have more curiosity to novelty apps like 9News.
DL : The name of 9News is quite concise and easy to be understood: 1 news for 9 different categories each day.
DL : Adobe creative suits, including Photoshop and Illustrator. For front end development part, I used Sublime Text for the most time.
DL : How to build the connection with shapes and emotion in a visual way, that is what the most unique aspect of my design.
DL : I really appreciate Tomás García Ferrari, who was my supervisor throughout this degree project. He gave me some great suggestions about choosing font and improving usability.
DL : As a responsive web app, HTML5, CSS3 and jQuery should be the framework of this project. I utilised SVG for the animation part.
