Muze Chat

Challenge: Muze Chat is a mobile messaging app built as a fully free-form canvas. When signing up, a user is taken through 8 pages, from asking for user details to choosing a profile photo. Each step needed an animated icon to represent each UX action, executed in Lottie, a JSON-based animation file format.

Execution: Muze crowdsourced sketches from their community of users via Twitter and Discord submissions. The ideas were incredible fodder for me to work with. With the help of Muze CEO, I chose the 8 that I could best work with to represent each action in the most playful, on brand way, in under 3 seconds each.

Lottie doesn’t support most AE expressions that are popular among animators, and treats other things kinda funny. Consequently, you have to animate actions manually, pushing and pulling lines, shapes, and keyframes, while trying to keep the final keyframe count low to safeguard file size, with constant checking the work to see if it looks correct once exported. Challenging, but gratifying when looking at the final product — like a puzzle.