Abby Jocson

Alright, before I start getting mushy and reflect on my past seven weeks plus what was my entire life for the past four years, I wanted to go over the last bit of work that I’ve done at my practicum.

I decided to stray completely away from the textured treatment of the photos and went for a more modern look. I was a bit hesitant to share this new design with Kenji as I did it without asking, but it ended up turning out well since he liked it! I took a risk but it’s one I had to take because I knew that I wasn’t satisfied with how the prior design was looking. The added elements of the dots and rectangles really brought the layout together.

My rationale for the change was that the textured vignettes felt a bit dated and didn’t scream VFX to me. When I think about VFX I think modern and futuristic, this is a field filled with technology that’s constantly improving and moving forward, and I wanted this layout to express that. Sure we aren’t breaking completely away from the mold, but it still looks pretty cool and different enough to remain interesting from other companies.

Unfortunately, that’s all I can pretty much share, there are other projects that I was involved in but they haven’t gone public yet so I can’t talk much about them. Guess that’s just how working in the industry is like.

That aside, my practicum has been a good experience. Truthfully it didn’t go the way that I wanted it to, but I’m glad I was able to have such an experience than none at all. Plus, I’ve learned that I have to get used to things not going my way, which is honestly something that I’ve been trying to understand for many years now.

I was talking about this with my family over dinner a few weeks ago about how being the youngest child in our family (immediate and extended), has made me used to getting things handed to me or done the way I want. But I’m learning every day that getting what you want takes effort and time, some things come faster and others slower, but what’s important is that you never stop trying to get to that end goal. So even though the sun is setting on my four years at IDEA, the sun will come up again the next day on the next chapter of my journey. I don’t know exactly where life is going to take me or what the next four years or even tomorrow will hold, but I know that I’m going to make it through it.

How is it almost the end!? I really thought it would feel a lot longer but it just flew by, despite that there’s still lots to do before my practicum is over. The latter half of my practicum so far has focused on polishing up the websites for Convoy VFX and Snap Animation.

For Snap Animation, the website is pretty much done and ready to send off to a developer. It was really cool how fast that came together. Some projects just work like that I suppose, and it would be nice if every project turned out that way, but that’s just not how life works. This is exactly the case for Convoy’s website, as that has been taking a bit more to get the layout and design just right.

I’m having trouble with it since darker and sleeker designs aren’t really my forte, but, it’s good to step out of your comfort zone every now and then so you can be more versatile. I know that my strength lies in lighter and more bubbly designs for UI, but it’s actually been quite nice to do something a bit darker and pulled back. Although, one particular component of the website interface has been a bit of a pain.

For the photo treatment, it could be a lot more textured or it could stay sleek and smooth. I personally prefer the smoother option, but I’ve learned that just because I like how something looks doesn’t mean everyone will think the same. While designing this website I thought a lot more about how to make the interactions unique while keeping it simple. I guess the difference between my workflow with Snap and Convoy, is that I spent more time looking at references and images for Snap, whereas I jumped right into designing lo-fi wireframes for Convoy. That’s probably why it took much longer to get Convoy to this step, as opposed to Snap which took about three days to get sorted.

Website design aside, again it’s crazy to think how everything is coming to a close. With practicum almost over, that means my four years at IDEA are coming to an end soon as well. I won’t start getting sappy now since I can leave that for my final report, but what a ride it’s been so far!

I’m so excited to finally share that I worked on this video for FireSmart BC. FireSmart BC is an “association… committed to raising awareness, providing information and developing forums to address common problems that encourage neighbourhood-based initiatives to reduce the risk of property losses and enhance safety in the wildland/urban interface” (FireSmart). The fox in the video, Ember, was created as a visual aid to help inform young children to adults about wildfire preparedness and safety.

Although I was only brought in closer to this project’s completion and worked on a small number of assets, it’s still cool to be able to point at something and go “Holy crap! I did that!”, even if it’s just a stack of logs. I guess it’s neat because it’s one of the few tangible projects that I’ve been part of that’s actually out there.

I’m sure it’s a feeling that I’ll get accustomed to as more of the projects I work on go live, but I want to be able to hold onto this feeling no matter how far I am into my career. Maybe I haven’t gotten quite so jaded yet that I’m able to say this, but I feel like it’s really important to acknowledge these feelings of accomplishment even if they start to become frequent, each and every one no matter how big or small, reminds me of why I chose to pursue design and art.

I’m glad that I was able to jump into this project without much trouble and was able to follow the illustration style. I guess it’s just a relief to know that I can follow instructions if they’re given to me and deliver on it! I know illustration is something that I’m comfortable doing, but I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to replicate the style or that I’d be at a loss as to how things should be laid out in certain scenes. Luckily I had lots of support from those who were involved in the project and I was able to reach out to them for any feedback.

To end this blog post, a picture of my mid-term check-in! It was a nice surprise that Kenji and Mark actually knew each other from way back, so I guess the design industry is a small world. It made me think about how the same thing will probably happen to me down the road and it’s exciting to imagine that I’ll be running into classmates and alumni doing all sorts of cool projects. The future is uncertain but I know that my classmates and I have some exciting things in store.

This week was all about wireframes! I was able to focus on creating layouts for two websites, Snap Animation and Convoy VFX. Both studios are distinct in style and personality, so it was fun jumping from one to the other. It was a lot easier for me to create a layout for Snap as its current style is something that I’m familiar working with, for example using bright colours, smooth edges, that sort of deal. Whereas Convoy was a bit more difficult and I’m still in the process of settling on how the wireframes should look, hence the several versions I have in Figma.

But that’s the wonderful thing about design and art is that there are so many ways to solve a problem visually, and one solution could lead to another. Sometimes the first idea might be the best, but it’s still good to explore other options available and sometimes that exploration can lend itself to your original idea. 

For example, this was one of the pages I created for Snap that ended up being scrapped. I had created two layouts for this page and the other one just happened to resonate with the brand’s style more. It’s still a continual process for me to accept that not everything I create will be a hit right away, or that something I think might look good might not actually be all that interesting to someone else. You can’t be precious about your work, but you should also know when to put your foot down if you know that something will look better if done a certain way. 

I think it’s been super fun working on wireframes this week, especially for desktop. A lot of my projects in IDEA focused on mobile formats, so while I’m quite comfortable designing in that realm, designing for desktop is something that I haven’t had much experience in. To be quite honest I couldn’t imagine myself doing UX/UI design after I graduated because I thought that it might be a tedious effort, but now that I’m doing it for real I’m actually having a fun time designing these interfaces. 

That being said, after a week of focusing on designing wireframes I took some downtime to draw an illustration for myself. This week was just as fun as the last and I’m looking forward to polishing up my wireframes and sending them off to a programmer and hopefully seeing it up and live sometime soon. 

The weeks are just flying by! It’s hard to believe I’m a little halfway through my practicum. Monday makes it seem like the week will drag on, but then you blink and all of the sudden it’s Friday and you’re trying to get everything done before the weekend starts. Don’t even get me started about how short weekends feel now!

I honestly can’t remember much of this week since it started busy and ended busy! On Friday I wasn’t feeling all that well and toward the end of the day, so I decided to retreat to my bed and continue the rest of my work on an iPad as shown above. I started creating rough layouts for one of the two websites I’ve been tasked with designing.

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Rough wireframes for the website

I’m a bit rusty creating wireframes for a website, so this was a welcome change of pace as well as a challenge! I think the extra real estate on website interface is nice, but I also find it difficult how to use the space efficiently without making the layout look too busy or empty. Although I do enjoy thinking about more creative ways of how to implement motion and gestures, as it’s not as limited as mobile in that respect.

As for other things I was working on this week. I mostly helped with fixing layouts for an animatic for FireSmart Canada. I can’t show the entirety of the scenes I worked on just yet, but maybe this sneak peek of cows will suffice.

Working on this project was interesting since I had to match the existing style that the team established. I thought it would be a lot more difficult, but it was actually relatively easy. The most difficult part was making sure that my layers were organized and in the right folders. There were so. Many. Layers. Well over five hundred for some scenes! I’ve worked with lots of layers, but never that many. I was really grateful that my computer managed to handle working with such big files.

I’m hoping in the next few weeks I’ll be able to share more work as some of the projects start to wrap up and go public. All in all though, I’m having a great time being able to lend a hand with all the work that’s been thrown at me.

I thought it would be fun to start off this blog post by talking about how I start off my weekday mornings. Ever since quarantine began last March, I had to find a substitute for my morning gym routine. I took up jump roping as it seemed to be the least expensive option, but I’m still dreaming of getting adjustable dumbbells one day to truly have a solid exercise set up at home. I’ve had most people ask me how I get up so early in the mornings to exercise, and I think in my head because I’ve tackled the most physically taxing activity of my entire day, I can overcome whatever else might come my way.

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Now for the actual work that I’ve done this week! Unfortunately, I once again cannot spill any beans on most of the projects I’m working on, but I can at least show some of my process thus far approaching these projects. It’s been really interesting to see just how much IDEA has prepared me, I truly feel like I’m working on a project that’s been assigned to me at school, but this time it’s going to be out there in the world for real. I still can’t wrap my head around the idea that my hands have physically touched something that will be published out there, but it’s really cool and I hope I can hold onto this feeling for a long time and remember that it’s exactly why I decided to pursue this career.

Just like last week, I’ve been bouncing from one project to another requiring different skills and approaches. This particular mood board was created to get a better idea of what the website could possibly look like. I made sure to ask beforehand what kind of energy and keywords describe the brand, to better capture the feel of what the design could be. After showing these two mood boards both were well received and we were able to decide which images spoke to the brand the strongest.

As for what I learned this week, I definitely saw how important communication and being proactive was. Especially since I’m doing my practicum remotely, I didn’t realize just how much I need to be a bit pushy and how it’s totally fine for me to do so. I was so used to being told what to do in school, that I was sort of waiting to be ordered around. Funny because I was talking in my last blog post about how I learned to take more initiative, but seems that’s going to be an ongoing process! All in all, even though I could have gotten more work done this week I’m glad that I had a lengthy conversation with Kenji about what’s expected from me and how this is the time for me to put everything I’ve learned to work.