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My partner Joseph and I originally thought of a few ideas on how to show the history of Denver. We didn’t want to just tell boring facts about places as that has been done a million times. A decision was made to discuss more about the deep roots Denver has telling interesting stories about it. There were ten original places, and most of them made the final cut with us choosing some other alternatives eventually. The original aesthetic we were going for was to make it feel old and historical with a map of downtown as the basis to move around to places. This was changed to a more modern map in the final, along with the aesthetic being made to fit a smart phone and be modern too.
I was tasked with getting the photography together for the app. While we gathered some stock content for the old versions, we needed high quality content for the new slides. After I visited the sites, I did all the editing in Lightroom Classic and came up with some of the final shots shown below. The catalog of all the photos has been lost to time unfortunately, along with the stock photos we chose. I also wrote a bunch of the copywrite material for half the locations.
The map was made by my partner so that users can move it around to get to the different locations. We also made one for Lakewood and Golden, as a few of our locations are outside of the original grid on the main page. One of the main challenges was making sure you could proceed forward on each screen, while also returning to the main menu at anytime. The intent was always to use the map as the navigation menu, so we purposely chose not to make a hamburger drop down. Many of the photos also had to be lined up correctly, while some screens also required a change in the coloring of the title. The old screens are white with a black text, while the new ones are black with a white text. This helped us differentiate the slides, especially on the ones we didn’t have older photos for. The buttons were made to be simple but also show that they had been pushed by being filled in. Finally, you can see how many links it needs to function correctly and navigate around to the different stories.
