roles

Social Media Marketing · Graphic Design · Marketing · Brand Identity · Motion Design · Video Editing · Photography

client

According to U.S. News, University of California San Diego is one the Top 10 Public Universities in the United States. The Undergraduate Admissions office is responsible for holding campus-wide events and advertising to hundreds of thousands of potential students, alumni, and parents.

team

I worked with a Social Media Coordinator, Communications Specialist, Videographer, and Copywriter to produce consistent content for the social media pages, website, and email newsletter.

objectives

As a Content Producer, I primarily contributed as a graphic and motion designer for all social media platforms. I collaborated cross-functionally with multiple teams to put out video, photo, and design content for social media pages, emails, and the Admissions website.

Over my term, the UC San Diego Admissions page following increased by approximately 65%, going from 6k to 10k Instagram followers.

pains

Working at UC San Diego was my first experience with brand identity, and I was not used to having such a rigorous approval process or visual limitations. This was difficult because my only design experience prior was academic clubs and one-off freelance projects like logos and advertisements.

Though this is staple for branding in general, I had to learn how to design without exploring different fonts, colors, and graphic elements. My experience at UC San Diego taught me how to remove my ego in order to work toward a client’s needs and not my own.

problems

Many of my ideas were thrown away, and I felt I had no space for creativity. I lost my love for design because I couldn’t find an outlet to experiment, and I questioned whether I could ever find joy in design.

Additionally, I had to keep marketing strategy in mind, so it was also a very new experience to work with a marketing team and learn how social media campaigns work.

solutions

In many ways, having limitations is beneficial in that it reins in the more idealistic ideas and creates a more defined pathway toward a solution. Since I already loved puzzle games (shout out to Professor Layton and Tetris!!), I realized I could have fun designing by solving problems and pushing the limit as far as I could.

I became adjusted to rejection and learned how to get back to the drawing board. Another great thing about this experience was I really wanted to learn motion design so I proposed to create gifs and animated intros/outros for whatever we needed. I explored a lot in After Effects and learned through spearheading these projects. 

roles

Animation Intern · Motion Design · Illustration · Art Direction

team

As an intern of the ITS Multimedia Team, I worked with video editors, animators, videographers and VFX artists to produce academic videos for various departments such as Math, Chemistry, and Biology at UC San Diego.

objectives

I worked on various Motion Graphics projects, including creating animated and static backgrounds and MOGRTs, or motion graphic templates, for the department to use as title card sequences for future projects.

Through After Effects, a MOGRT can have properties that an editor in Premiere would be able to adjust and change. For example, if you assign a slider onto the Y-position and X-position of the text, a video editor would be able to move things up and down without having to go into the animation file. Similarly, you can do this for color, rotation, fonts, etc.

problems

While MOGRTs are very minimal and simplistic visually, the process of creating a motion design template was something that stuck with me. Bringing in animation into a template changes quite a lot since one would have to account for text size, line count, adjustments, etc.

MOGRTs are designed to make it easier for an editor to just plop into a Premiere file and quickly add/adjust text and color. As a user, what type of problems would come up that we have to design for?

For instance, if the way that the animation was designed was not meant for a very short title or a very long title, certain parts of the text would be misaligned. How is an editor supposed to fix it, assuming they have little to no experience with After Effects or animation?

solutions

This is where I think some aspects of UX can be implemented. Product designers need to know every single potential outcome and problem that can arise from a user interaction.

For the examples provided, I decided to animate vertically rather than having horizontal borders in order to avoid cutting off text and solve some of the technical animation issues. Designers must account for as many outcomes as possible for the user while not creating too many adjustable properties for the editor as to not overcomplicate the UI on Premiere.

This aspect of problem solving and figuring out all the iterations of user issues that would come up is what made this project really fun and challenging.