Summer Marketing: Fall Postcard

We started to explore a more whimsical appearance to the Fall postcards with colorful lines wrapping around the UT tower. The second version was generally liked, so I’ll just be making edits/adjustments to the design to make it stronger.

 

Basic Training: Custom Course Graphics

Drumroll please…. presenting the completed custom course graphic design menu! Earlier in the semester I was assigned to a custom course graphic task but I didn’t have much experience with it. Afterward, I decided to complete this training so that the next time I have a similar task, I’ll be well prepared.

Animation Training

This week has been dedicated to my new animation training of creating a rigged walk cycle. I completed my character design and learn a ton ab Illustrator. It’s a very intimidating program at first but like all software, it gets easier to figure out. Here’s my final design.

I made all the limbs different groups and was able to organize the character pretty well. Next up is rigging in After Effects!

This was actually pretty hard to find a tutorial on surprisingly. A lot of tutorials on after effects rigging rely on an After Effects extension called DUIK. Apparently it’s one of the best extensions for After Effects, but I don’t need any more fancy tools so I stuck with vanilla After Effects (DUIK also costs money and I don’t think that’s the best move).

I found a tutorial on After Effects layer parenting and was able to attach all the limbs to the appropriate joints.

Here’s my progress on the walk cycle.

https://utexas.box.com/s/whr4jxsn20pprek068pwg98fh5wg45sq 

It’s very robotic and kind of unsettling to look at, but I plan to just get the key poses done and then to add more aniation principles later.

I’ve been having a lot of fun with this project! I’m learning new programs, I’m designing a character, and I’m practicing something I really love! I’m excited to see the final look.

 

New Trainings!

I completed the history of design training! This one was a lot of fun since I feel like emulating a style you like makes you appreciate it more.

I chose to do 2 of these since I wanted to do the Dada era art but that was more photoshop focused and I wanted to get more practice in Illustrator so I did the New Typography style too. Here’s how they turned out.

I got a new animation training assignment which I’m really excited about! I don’t have a lot of experience in using rigged animation and this training will really help me understand it better.

I need to design a character in Illustrator that I can then rig and animate a walk cycle for in After Effects. I don’t have great knowledge in rigged animation in After Effects and I basically know nothing about Illustrator, so I really wanna see what I can do here!

I started by practicing basic illustration in Illustrator. I used this youtube video to do a follow-along practice and tried to recreate the character design in the video. Here’s how it looked (I got impatient and didn’t want to do the body).

Then I moved onto following this video to learn how to sketch out my own character in illustrator. Here’s how it’s looking so far.

I’m trying to be very conscious that this design will be able to be rigged in the future so I’ll try to hold off on making the design heavily detailed. I look forward to how this will turn out!

2023 Caricature

I was inspired by Lorena to update my caricature for 2023! Although not much has changed about me, I like this outfit more because purple is my favorite color! I also updated my hair (a very minor change but it makes a difference to me!)

STA Training: UIUX with Figma

Start: Oct 13th, 2023

To be Completed: N/A

Staff Guidance: De’sha

Project Description: Learn the fundamentals of user experience and use Figma to develop my NEW personal portfolio website and see how this process can make the website easier.

I started to work on this training for “client 2”. I read through the whole KB and found it cool to design a brand new personal portfolio website for myself with all the knowledge I learned. After ideations, I created these wireframe and user flow by listing out all the pages in its big “three-pages structure”. I found it’s cool to combine my personal logo as part of the website so I can create strong designer taste and personality.

 

Here is my Figma file (digital website mockup) for myself to develop it in Figma.

Here is how my website looks like now. I want to refine it by adding fancy animation and rolling effect on it. I might start a new design research on how to make website effect with custom coding and the design approach of it.

Specially, the first animation I want to create a frame-by-frame transition from a statement introducing who I am to the selected design works. I get the inspiration from Apple official website. I really love their aesthetic, color scheme, and web animation that works for their fantastic storytelling. If I’m able to make that tutorial, I might start with the case study of it. Moreover, I want to add in the basic transition/hover effect when people natural scroll the page. Such animation give people a smooth experience and emphasize the clickable section of the page when they want to explore around. I believe that it’s extremely crucial for web designer know how to guide people and imply information via details.