"Hamster Living" is a ficticious magazine for pet owners who own hamsters and are looking for ways to improve their pet's space and be part of the hamster community.

Hamster Living is a lifestyle magazine for hamsters that showcases the living areas of hamsters, and how owners have creatively used space to create interesting living spaces for their pets. Whether it is via providing gourmet foods for the pet or photoshoots of hamsters showcasing contests.

The goal of this project is to promote the brand "Hamster Living", originally created in Term 1 in BCIT for Graphic Design. Utilizing Adobe After Effect to effectively communicate and animate the Logo, the main purpose is to showcase the ability to produce Motion Graphic video for a magazine using additional softwares such as: Adobe Illustrator & Adobe After Effects.

Research & Brainstorming

Hamster Living was created using a mind map to branch out ideas and form goals for the magazine. This idea for a hamster magazine was influenced by YouTubers who posts videos online on cooking food in a miniature kitchen for their pets. Showcasing, that taking care of a small pets can produce creativity for small pet owners.

The idea also came about, after taking care of small pet hamsters myself and redesigning their living space. This lead to the idea, that I could create other ways produce a much more intriguing life for a hamster inside and outside their cage.

For Project 1, redefining the logo – my brainstorming included, researching ideas and tutorials on how to create an animated logos. In addition, to looking at what others have done to create a much more successful motion design logo.

Sketches

Thumbnails and Roughs were created to draw out ideas for the Logo, Web Banner, Web Mockup home page, and the hamster living magazine cover.

For the project 1, in order to create a animated logo for this brand, sketches in a storyboard format had to be created in order to get started.

Preparation & Organization

For the magazine cover, web banner, and mockup website – I used InDesign and prepared layout templates, fonts, and font sizes to be used for the final design. Fonts had to be downloaded and images were downloaded from royalty free websites such as Adobe Stock or UnSplash. The color theme was then chosen from the palette from the images collected and the preferred target market audience.

For Project 1 – In order to take my logo into Adobe After Effects, re-organization in Adobe Illustrator was necessary to get started. Each letter needed to have its own layer and proper names, so that the process in Adobe After Effects would be a breeze.

When the Adobe illustrator file is ready to be imported into Adobe After Effects, re-organization of which layers need to be animated first becomes another important factor in AE. As well as, making sure the composition settings are correct.

Final

For the magazine cover, web banner, and website mockup, using Adobe XD, information in what to put in the content became another factor. Since real content needed to be placed, information had to be made up. And proper position for text and images were required to follow the design principles for the project.

For Project 1, a tutorial video found on YouTube was used on how to get started on the project. This resulted with the Hamster symbol running on the circle shape that represents the hamster wheel, which finishes on the wordmark. After that the circle symbol expands and takes over the screen in a different color.

Recollect

Challenges

• Not knowing where to start
• Storyboard Sketching - Trying to imagine the flow of the animation and how I wanted the final result to look
• Achieving the intended result and making sure it matched what I had intended

What I learnt

• There are a lot of AMAZING~ Motion Graphics Tutorials online!
• If you already have Logo, it is a breeze to focus on the animation
• Getting your AI File ready for AE is important, but so is organization!
• When my animated logo was complete, there is a sense of reward
• Even though animation on AE is a lot faster than 2D animation by hand, it is still time consuming to animate