My name is Dakota (Kota) Ostler, an avid graphic designer with over 3+ years of professional work experience. Surprisingly enough I haven’t gone to school for graphics design, but after learning basic graphic design for Lone Peak High School’s student counsel, I started as an intern doing website mockups for dental and medical clients, doing 2-4 web mockups a week.
After I had built up my portfolio and had enough experience, I moved my passions to social media graphics and mobile application design. I’ve maintained 4 mobile apps with variants for each mobile operating system.
My latest accomplishment is having designed an Apple watch app that was available on the product release date.
The Yellow Pages App is pretty simple regarding functionality. It is essentially an outlet for businesses to be found through localization and listing their business, similar to that of Yelp and Google Businesses. Simply the user types or speaks what they are looking for and their location and we deliver the best results of local businesses.
One of the features that sets us apart from our competition is the ability to search for products. This is done and collected cumulatively from thousands of online and local retailers and brings that information directly to the user.
Around the announcement of the Android 5.0 Lollipop update, Google came out with their new design language “Material Design“. I fell in love with the ideas and visual clarity of material. So I started to redesign our current Yellow Pages and White & Yellow Pages apps for the Android Operating System to better fit with this new visual language.
I was able to use Google’s Material Design Guidelines as a starting point to begin my research into how I could take their ideas and adapt them to the applications. Another helpful resource for me was materialup.com where material style work is featured from designers all over the world on how they are adapting the design language.
Soon after completing the design for the Material Redesign, Apple had announced their new product the “Apple Watch” as Yellow Pages was available for download from the App Store on initial release date for iOS devices, I felt we should keep the trend and have the Yellow Pages Apple Watch extension on the App Store on the release date of the device. This turned out to be a really neat experience for me to design for something that nobody had designed for previously.
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