Production Idea & Process

The design style of the video was inspired by the “The Tokyo 2020 Kinetic Sports Pictograms” video made for 2020 Tokyo Olympics, where different from any olympics promotion videos before, Japan made the video into symbolic Pictograms with dynamic fade-in and fade-out animations. Each of the pictograms was designed with delicacy and fitted the actual sports program that will be carried out during the olympics events. The animations, together with the single-colored form, strongly showcased the characteristics of each sports program. Combining the strength, speed and vitality of the athletes, this video inspired me of this visual expression idea.

Leveraging the idea from the video, I planned to make a work with similar style, for my favorite YouTubers, with my sort of innovation in the icon design and the animation. I gathered more than 18 youtubers from different channels, with the comprehensive observation of their typical behavior, pet phrases, and channel styles & memes. I designed the pictogram style for each of them, as well as the tailored fade-in/out animation that best showcases their traits.

The Challenging Part

The main difficulty was the design part, where the animation needed to be perfectly and precisely made to demonstrate the true tone of each selected YouTuber. I gathered a bunch of picture as well as video materials for them, and watched the video for each one to capture the action that were worthy enough to be animated.

The animation production was purely 2D, with me designed with considerations in information precense and minimalization, so that the icons are similar to the original video, but do not lose visual trait for the avatars.

Outcome

The result was surprisingly becoming one of my most popular video ever made, and most of the comments were acclaiming how detailed and vivacious the video was made, especially the capture of their behaviors and the animation.