Beautiful data-driven wallpapers
GOOGLE LIVE WALLPAPERS
Overview
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Design Lead / Creative Director
I was the design lead and acted as Project Manager as well. I oversaw the entire project from concept to shipping.
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Default Wallpapers
We built beautiful data driven wallpapers that fit in the Google ethos. For the very first Pixel phone our wallpapers were the default ones.
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Early
Shipping for hardware comes with very tight deadlines. Us being late would have pushed back the release of Google’s pixel phone. Proud to say we were not only on time, but shipped early.
KICK OFF
We started with a kickoff with Google and ustwo. We laid out a plan and sketched out concepts focusing on key data points.
EXPLORE
A big part of landing on designs was exploring a range of concepts.
This included understanding the different Data Types we can work with.
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Data Types
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Abstract Data
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Data Types
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Categorizing Time
COLLABORATION
A big part of the success was getting designers and developers sitting together and working on prototypes.
This was especially true for a project that relied on hardware performance as much as this one. Creating mockups and animations are great, but we needed to know how the phone would respond in overall performance.
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Getting the designers and devs sitting next to each other was critical. It even got to the point where the designers were editing pieces of code to see how their designs would respond.
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CONCEPTS
We eventually settled on three concepts we refined, prototyped, and shipped. They are:
Orbit
Shadow
Timelapse.
ORBIT
A playful take on telling time.
Dot :: Second
Ring :: Minute
Square :: Hour
SHADOW
Using current time and weather data, appropriate shadows are left throughout the day.
TIMELAPSE
Detailed weather conditions and time dynamically update the background gradients.
IN THE END
The Orbit concept was used for promotional marketing and Timelapse was the default wallpaper on the very first Pixel phone. Oh and everything shipped early!
