Published on | Prototyping: From UX to Front End — Medium Lu Gan Selected work from my mobile UI exercises

My Behance Page: https://www.behance.net/ajean88girdbd2

This is the first article I write on Medium. After read hundreds of designers and artists’ stories, now I start my own. A special thank to Mr. Wieringen, the Experienced Design Leader at Best Buy. He motivated me to share my thoughts on a blog where people communicate and enjoy.

My Understanding of Design

To be short, design brings value to an object and leads people to a better life. As a UX Designer, I can create something for users with seamless experience and pleasing appearance. Design is doing a meaningful thing for people that can solve a painful problem, or bring an innovative method that changes a traditional perspective.

Why I Start the Daily Exercises

Design is the core skill of a designer. That’s one of the most important reasons I start my Daily Design Exercise. I want to practice my visual sense, improve proficiency of tool usage, get the experience of different design forms and, record my daily life via the eyes from a UX designer. I enjoy the time when I opened Sketch(and many other tools as well) and was creating elements on the canvas.

Stories behind Images

I would love to share the stories about my works. Starting from July 18th, there are 63 pieces on my Behance page. My plan is to try different visual/design formats for every 20 pieces. The first 20 images, I draw illustrations, then 20 mobile UI interfaces, 20 motion graphics. Now I am creating interfaces on various screen sizes and shapes (such as iPhoneX, Samsung S8 and Apple Watch). This strategy enables me to explore the design world as many as I can, and helps me to target on one or two fields for deeper study in the near future.

I paused two times when I was traveling around Japan and flew back to the U.S. This is not a daily task; if I got too tired or ran out of inspiration, I would rather not to draw an image simply because I need to.

In this article, I am going to choose some of my past works and explain how I got inspired and how I created them. If you are interested in a piece I do not talk about, please leave me a message. 🙂

Day 1: Roe Sushi

The beginning is always the hardest. I came up with over twenty ideas in my mind on that day, and finally chose to draw a roe sushi. After considering the general shape and possible colors of this tiny object, I opened Sketch and clicked the Vector tool.

It took me about 30 minutes from a blank canvas to the final image. I could add more details, but I want to keep it simple at first so I can gradually increase the difficulty.

Day 3: Cherry Beer

This past summer, I interned at the National Institute of Informatics as a UX Designer. It was an amazing experience: I had countless opportunities to meet new people and listened to their varied and graceful experience. Every Thursday evening, I joined a weekly event and ran around the Tokyo Imperial Palace (5km). I saw familiar people as well as new faces. We usually had a light dinner together after the running. The cherry beer was the recommendation from a German guy. I like the bottle and its sweet flavor, so I chose it as the topic for my exercise.

Day 13: Cruise

I had a chance to stay a night on the cruise while I was in Osaka. I brought my laptop and camera with me for this short trip. The cruise was very huge: it had five layers for tourists and three layers for clerks. Comparing to other small boats at the port, it looked like a white giant. I spent a whole afternoon on the deck watching the surrounding landscape. The sunset was extremely beautiful which I could hardly use a word to describe. The cruise then became my object on the canvas that night.

Day 14: Fireworks

During the summer, there are many fireworks festivals all around Japan. Men and women, old and young people will wear Yukata (a light cotton kimono) to celebrate together. I went to the Sumidagawa Fireworks Festival, one of the biggest festivals held in Tokyo, with my friend who is studying in the Tokyo University. Unluckily, it rained heavily and I was not sure whether the fireworks show would be played or not. We squeezed ourselves among people on a street near the river and tried to find a spot with a wide field of vision. Finally we found a place behind a temple, a few people had already stood there, holding umbrellas or wearing raincoats. The rain dropped into my eyes, wet my skirt and backpack. The upset was gone when a small firework flew into the rainy sky and light people’s eyes. The fireworks festival started!

On that night, I explored several ways of visual representations to illustrate fireworks, and decided to use asymmetric rays. In order to make sure all rays have the same rotation point, I drew a circle in the middle of the figure and carefully align the end of each ray on the circle border. In Adobe After Effects, there is an anchor point to adjust the rotation, but I found the anchor point is hard to manage in Sketch. If someone knows how to utilize the point, please kindly let me know.

My Behance Page: https://www.behance.net/ajean88girdbd2

There are many other stories I would love to share, I will keep updating once I have time on the weekends. If you want to hear the story of a specific work, leave me a message!

Comments and feedbacks are welcome. 🙂

My Story with Daily Design Exercises was originally published in prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

My Story with Daily Design Exercises

Cool stuff, every week

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