Barry, A Touch Bar for Creative Minds
It all started with the idea of creating a simple but powerful new device to help speeding up any creative workflow, with no limits. That's how barry came to life. barry is a totally customizable wireless touch bar, compatible with both osX and Windows software. In addition, barry is community driven, as any mappings and set up for any application can be shared and downloaded by any user around the world for free.
barry has been my first big challenge as a product designer. This time I had to go over just messing around with 3D softwares for my own pleasure. I wanted it to look as real as possible, which ended up in hours of rendering, understanding the basis of product shooting and always having one or two tabs open on some Apple product website.
Perfecting the materials, the lighting of the scene and the reflections of the glass has been the biggest part of this job.
I wanted barry to follow the principles of minimalism and a strong timeless design. Barry comes in two versions to suit any modern workspace: Onyx (anodized black aluminium) and Alabaster (white ceramic).
Cinema 4D became my best friend during the development of this idea. It's simple and powerful, especially if used in combination with tools like GSG Texture Kit and Lightning Kit (which I totally recommend guys).
In parallel with the development of the device, I had to come out with a UI for barry. I used Sketch to fashion a credible set of buttons and to style the elements that I would have later combined in the creations of the mappings.
Flinto helped me with the development of the little UI animation you see at the top, nothing fancy, but it works and gives an Idea of the subtleness I wanted for barry interactions.
In conclusion, Photoshop glued all together in the final form you see here.
The response has been surprisingly good! And it is still evolving. It is always nice to receive feedback and personal messages saying "Man you should definitely do it" or "Kickstarter now!!". It makes me feel as this product has been understood my target audience, which is the greatest sensation ever for me in this job.
It's full of weather app, calendar app, personal finance app designs out there. If I can give you a personal advice. Try to come up with a new idea, that doesn't sound like a DailyUI challenge, and go with it!
