To kickoff the high fidelity prototype, we diverged on our own time to generate ideas for what we could market as the brand for this app. With consideration to our personas and target market, we wanted to create an aesthetic that kept to the retro feel but captured the essence of our app in modernizing the drive-in experience.

Each group member did a mini style guide putting together at least one logo concept, fonts, and a relevant color scheme. We then came together to converge on ideas which lead to a creative meeting where we grabbed bits, cut, and fine tuned each element until we had an overall concept we were happy to call CarFlix.

With an overall agreement on the direction of the brand, we split off work to prep our Figma file to prototype in high fidelity by creating text styles, color presets, and a library of shared components.

Part of the divergence mentioned above was spent on establishing a color palette. Just as typography can, color palettes can also communicate the feeling of a certain era. We wanted colors that would be reminiscent of the advertising and signage from the 1950's.

As a part of the "mob designing" session mentioned above, we ended up picking some colors from a few different mini style guides and merging them into one color palette.

From there, the next step for colors was to create the palette in Figma and add each color as a "color style" so that we could maintain consistency in our high fidelity prototype.

Another part of our initial divergence was focused on generating typography pairings for our app. We were attempting to tiptoe a line of some retro-inspired fonts that had great readability at small sizes. A lot of the retro display fonts, while creating a lot of nostalgia, either took up too much space in an interface or interrupted readability.

After dot voting on font combinations, we ended up taking a heading font from one pairing and joining it with the body copy font from another.

In the end, we landed on Barlow, a California-inspired grotesk font, for the headings and on Nunito Sans, a rounded font very readable at small sizes, for the body copy.

We had identified the following components as candidates that would appear across multiple areas of our prototype: Cards, Nav Bar, Text/Form Fields, Buttons, Tiles, Toggle Switches, Tabs, Tags, Progress Bars/Indicators, Tooltips, Icons, and Badges.

We then split this work to begin shaping the components and met later to review and adjust them together in a library file. Where possible, we included hints at retro design styles and signage to tie back to the branding and the original era of drive-in's. A few examples of those hints are showcased in this image slider.