Designers
Justin Yu, Claret Egwim-Nwagbara, Alex Luowan, Luke Do, Terence Xu
Year
2025
Category
New Talent
Country
Canada
School
Simon Fraser University
Teacher
Russell Taylor
Three questions to the project team
What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
We approached this project wanting to create highly expressive visuals that could represent the vibrant personalities behind 88rising's brand while incorporating touches of their Asian background. These visuals had to be paired with equally experimental interactions that would make the website a joy to explore, giving fans a draw to use the site as their main touchpoint. We went through numerous iterations before landing our visual style, and even then we had to question if we were pushing the line too far in a way where expressiveness overwhelmed communicating functionality. Were the interactions too confusing for the average fan to understand? Were the visuals taking too much away from the actual brand's content?
What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
I was responsible for fleshing out our final visual direction, interactions, and prototyping the final build, so my highlight of the project was when we landed our visual style. At this point of the project we had been stuck in research for 4 weeks before getting to visuals. Everybody on the team gave it a shot, but after a week we weren't satisfied with our results until the idea for the homepage featuring languages and countries of 88rising's artists came into fruition. Every other page quickly fell into place right after that, and riding a wave of massive momentum, we were able to fully build out the rest of the site design within a week. It was one of the most fulfilling weeks of my life as a designer.
Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
Now that I've graduated from school and looking to work in industry where projects often don't reach a similar level of experimentation and expressiveness, I expected to regard this project as one of my proudest works. Being able to push the boundaries of design and encapsulate our teachings within this final project and pull it off successfully felt amazing. Completely having ownership of the project and the design process throughout allowed our vision to be played out. In five years I'll still expect this project to be the one I show to friends and employers as an example of what my team and I were capable of.
