Japanese Pattern Inspired Animated Design

Japanese Pattern Inspired Animated Design

I’ve been learning Adobe software recently and I decided to try and make a design reminiscent of the patterns I would find on cloth in Japan. I believe the designs that this took inspiration from are primarily from the Meiji era, though I could be wrong and would like to be corrected if so.

I went in with some idea of what I wanted to create, but with an open mind as to how the finished work would be. Because of this I had more assets created in Illustrator than I needed.

After making lots of assets to get used to Adobe Illustrator I ended up using some simple cloud designs to not over complicate the design and to create a better balance overall.

Once I was happy with the design I opened up After Effects to try and animate the clouds.

I personally haven’t had much experience with After Effects at all but thought that it could be an interesting challenge, and a chance to learn much like what I had been doing with Illustrator so far on this piece.

As it’s my first real time using After Effects I kept it simple and made a loop of the clouds slowly crossing the screen behind the other elements of the design. This was to give a somewhat serene sense to the piece, and to stick to the spirit of the inspirations.

It's not perfect, and with half a day having passed I can see somethings I would look to improve on for my next piece. All that said, this came out better than I imagined it initially would and I learned a lot from this project.