Day 25–29

This entire week was pretty slow. I mainly focused on finishing some mood boarding and handing off some files to production and the client for a couple of advertising projects.

There were a couple of things that were interesting this week, though. One was about the social media animations I’ve been working on. It has been a slow process, but a good experience nonetheless. I got to brief one of the animators I found on Thursday! Thankfully, I asked John to go over with me the main things I should cover before heading into that meeting so I wouldn’t get stuck. But overall, it was super exciting to be able to explain a project idea and goal to an outsourced talent, rather than being briefed to this time!

I also started illustrating for one of the other animations in the same series. It’s been going a little slowly because it’s a vector-based illustration, and I haven’t done a textured illustrator on AI in such a long time. But what’s it’s been fun is working with the motion designer on the team to confirm what assets he needs and what new things are possible with After Effects plug-ins. He is super appreciative of designers who know how to do motion because his work process goes so much smoother. He explained how sometimes he has to recreate assets to make them usable for motion, which adds to his workload and time. So, good job IDEA, for touching on some motion design!

One last neat thing from this week was hearing Jeff Harrison go over his process working on the Tim Horton’s Lid Project! It’s been one of my favourite projects from 123w because of how user-focused the entire project was and how unique the product solution was. A couple of themes Jeff kept in mind was sustainability and ergonomics while still establishing a strong brand identity component special to Tim Horton’s. He produced an incredible amount of concepts and designs throughout a couple of years and researched and learned a ton of new things to make a functional product.

Jeff mentioned that this career is cool because we’re concept-driven. We can work on anything and with anybody to create something from a concept. For this project specifically, he worked closely with an engineer he knew from Hong Kong to work out the mathematics and eventually 3D printed samples of the lids to test. I’d love to be able to work on a project like this in the future!

And finally, I ended the week with Friday Virtual Drinks—the last one of my practicum! I love 123w because of how casual and open everyone is to talk about a range of topics, from what to do about old TV shows and movies with racist and homophobic overtones to contemplating getting Gen Z curtain bangs and the potato filter on Zoom.