MTV3 Mail service ‘Luukku’ has been wanting an overhaul for a long time.
Due to limited screen spaces, it leaves less room for designer to work in. Mobile design is all about function and all aesthetics must be subject to functionality. This means we will be doing quite a bit of more testing than in our other projects. It also means that mobile presence of a brand needs to be boiled down to minimum.
When a service has been untouched for a long time it becomes less attractive for advertisers. Empty ad spaces leave holes in the design—something I did not foresee when designing this layout several years ago.
How did it get left so far behind? Maybe since the original HTML has been rather well constructed—this old work horse has been made less of a priority—But would it have gotten a make-over much sooner, had it been poorly designed?
Color scheme in Luukku webmail was bright – we might either go with that or introduce brand colors with a strong scheme. Microsoft Metro is all about ”Authentically Digital” – Maybe this approach could give the service a bit of a look of a web application?
…or maybe not. Playing with brand colors proves that red is far out. In background it’s wild and using red in buttons suggests they all have alert functions. What was I thinking…?
I decided to keep a slightly more traditional approach and gave up the alert colors. With some quick tests that I ran with my colleagues, my options boiled down to these three.
Fonts for Android is more complex issue
Roboto
