Brainstorming Session #1

I was going to wait until the weekend, but I have found myself with a free afternoon (a rare jewel at that). I figure while I am waiting for some comprehensive results of my first survey, I should brainstorm about how I want to the site to be so I can plan some more testing.

The key things that came out of the brainstorm are as per the below:

1. Interactivity

I want the users to be able to upload and download resources, select their favorite designers, use a project feature to guide them through a graphic design project, tag each other in their creations and share the attribution where necessary, communicate through comments, private messaging and forums and finally write and share tutorials, articles and third party links for graphic design.

2. Projects

I want users to be able to "Start a project" where they can name it and post their concept (optional feature). The user can then choose to either user a series of assistant features where they can record and discuss their progress during the design phase if they choose. Alternatively, the more experienced designers may not want to bother with this feature so it will all be optional and you can choose your project type from the beginning. Any resource used in the project will need to be tagged to the resource and designer location, or if the user has created the resource themselves they need to upload it to be shared with others. The final result will be a combination of the designers own creation and adaptations of the shared resources available. These final pieces will be added to the users portfolio and showcased in the online gallery.

3. Creative Commons Acceptance

The whole concept of the website is to create a design community who share resources, idea's and their creations. As standard anybody who uploads a resource (photo, illustration, clipart, Photoshop elements, patterns, stock images) will need to choose from a preselected list of creative commons licenses. All of these resources will be open for remixing and commercial use (remixed only, not the original form). The only content that is exempt from this rule is the artwork created through the projects where the designer will get a choice to select additional creative commons licensing which will allow them to block commercial use. As a community of professional designers it is important that the resources can be remixed and used commercially.

4. Copyright issues

After considering how the licensing is going to work, it occurred to me that people would be able to upload artwork and resources to the website and claim them as their own. I will need to research ways to tackle this off the top of my head though, they would need to agree to terms and conditions when becoming a member and accept a disclaimer when uploading content. I would incorporate a "report copy" function on each element so other users could report items they believe are not original.

5. Typography

I hadn't thought about it until the last minute of the brainstorm, but in addition to the already mentioned resources it would be great to have user created fonts also!

6. FlowChart

I've started to consider how the interface and navigation will actually work although more research on the concept and testing needs to be completed before I can look at this properly.