Side projects, rough drafts, half-baked ideas.
Not every project is a win, but every project teaches you something.
Rive Experiments
If you want a long career in design and animation, and you don’t want your job to turn into writing client emails and signing off on briefs with no time to actually make anything, you’ve got to put in the hours to learn new things. It can be a new piece of software, a physical tool like photography, a soft skill like mentoring, or (if you spend too much time on LinkedIn) you can become a “prompt engineer”.
I’ve been spending time with Rive lately, a tool focused on 2d UI/UX animation but with a lot of flexibility and a lot of hype around it. I’m not learning it “for” anything, other than to try and figure out what it can do, and what I might want to do with it.
Hover Interactions (desktop-focused)
In my sketchbook lately I’ve been drawing a lot of these kinds of shapes.
I started to think that I should bring them into After Effects and make them move. For the last several years (maybe decade?) abstract geometric animation has been in vogue. You see it a lot in explainers, and when done well looks amazing. But maybe there’s enough of that already.
What if you could have that, but have it interactive? I’ve not seen much of that and wanted to give it a shot.
Currently it animates on hover, each of the six shapes gets its own movement. Adding click interaction is the next step. Stay tuned.
Flights, a sketchbook
One of my favorite travel activities is sketching in airports. I don’t love airports. I’ve been delayed and stranded way too many times to call myself a fan, but they are people watching turned up to eleven.
On a recent trip from Berlin to Los Angeles, we found ourselves in BER, Charles de Gaulle and LAX for a few hours at a stretch and it was sketchbook time.
The quote is from Flights by Olga Tokarczuk.
Week Numbers:
What’s interesting about week numbers? Maybe it’s connected to that Oliver Burkeman book, or maybe it’s easier to imagine doing weekly side projects rather than dailies. I’ve abandoned Inktober (and related daily challenges) a half-dozen times and realise that I bristle a bit at doing “someone else’s project”. So this is mine! Enjoy.
Week Numbers, 2024
In previous years I used the week numbers as an excuse to draw on my iPad in the evening and nerd out on some typography.
This year I’ve been learning Rive and realised that this would be a great project to bring some interaction to, and see if I could bring back a little bit of the early 2000s Geocities vibe to my static, Web 2.0 website.
Just like in previous years, not every week will be a winner and that’s okay.
Hover, click, explore. Some will more interactive, some less.
Week Numbers, 2020
Week Numbers, 2021
