Update: I built this! You can check it out and subscribe at www.seeordontsee.com
I love going to the movie theater. The darkness, the recliners, the smell of the popcorn. It all makes me happy. I go see a movie about once a week and before I buy my tickets I take a peek at sites like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes to check up on how the movie is being received.
I don’t read reviews, instead I just glance at the overall scores to see if the movie I have in mind is worth a 2 hour investment.
I usually take a look at 3-4 apps or websites:
It’s not a major time suck, but it does take a few minutes to pull up each site, wade through the ads and pop ups and all the visual noise. All I want is the rating number from each so I can get a sense of the sentiment and I can quickly make my determination.
I started playing around with the idea of an Instagram or TikTok account that just had these numbers front and center for each major new movie release. Simple and clean – I can get what I’m after with just a glance.
I looked around to find something like this. I could not find it. So I opened up Figma and created a mockup:
I left empty space at the top and bottom of the screen to account for all the extra UI elements that Instagram and TikTok add to a story/post. All the important elements are safe and won’t be overlaid with extra visual noise.
The main numbers from each of my favorite 4 movie rating sites are front and center at the top of the screen. I used IBM Plex Sans Condensed for the type mainly because it remains super readable even at the small size that I need to use.
Overall it is simple, but nice.
I then starting thinking, it would be cool if the 4 numbers were averaged together for a ‘super score’. It would make it ever easier to gauge the overall movie sentiment from critics and reviewers.
A few more mockups in Figma:
I then thought it might be interesting to add a color to visually represent the super score. This would even make the overall movie sentiment even more obvious with just a quick glance.
So I created a couple more treatments in Figma which include the color indicator:
Overall, I’m happy with the simplicity.
I wish this existed as an Instagram account or maybe even a weekly email. It was fun to play around in Figma and who knows, maybe I’ll ship this one day.
in Michigan