Color Cook

As Josef Albers examined the interaction of color, he stated that we rarely see a color that is not affected by another color. For this assignment, students were asked to prove that the viewer's perception of color changes based on its context.

Brief

Using motion or interaction, showcase the principle of Simultaneous Contrast: make two colors look like the same color, or make the same color look like two colors.

A simple solution to this brief can be found here: samesameordifferent.com

Ideation

Viewing this project as an opportunity to experiment with mobile interfaces and interactions, we decided to pursue a mobile game. With this game, we wanted to create challenging elements that would give players a sense of accomplishment after completing all of our challenges.

While ideating for the concept of our game, Verli and I looked for instances in the world where color plays a vital role. Our ideas ranged from traffic lights to jigsaw puzzles.

Early Concept

One of my early concepts was a play on a childhood favorite of mine: Pokémon. I saw pokeballs as a recognizable object that relied on large swatches of color. In this game, players would be asked to correctly match a piece of a pokeball to its true color.

Final Development

We continued to develop this concept and added an overarching theme to the game to give it more purpose. Inspired by cooking video games such as Cooking Mama, we tasked players to cook a complete dish. To do so, they are required to match ingredients from their pantry with ones in the recipe. Affected by the colored background of the ingredients, players have to avoid choices with different values and saturations than the original ingredient.

To improve the game experience, we added a system to level up in rank and collection page that showcases the completed dishes that the player has assembled.

Reflection

Color Cook was my first experience designing a mock app. It required me to think through what steps the user would need to take to complete the game and how we should design the artboards accordingly.

If I were to revisit this project, I would:

• Create an icon for the app that would be displayed on dashboards

• Add features to enable players to compete with their friends

• Add an option for players to purchase new recipes to add to their collection

Thanks for reading!