Role: Motion Design, Illustration, Video Editing
Company: Art of Problem Solving
Published: 2025
AoPS Studio was a concept for a maker's space centered around Art of Problem Solving's philosophy to give young thinkers the tools to solve hard problems. Although traditionally a math company, we decided to explore the completely opposite end of the equation, and develop a classroom where students could explore creative concepts like art, design, creative writing, robotics.
A WEEK TO WIN
As part of our 2025 Hackathon project, we had one week to create a responsive & modern website website for our studio, a 3D rendering of our maker's space, a fully-fleshed curriculum & course offerings, a video reel to go along our presentation, and a marketing campaign to advertise our idea. My task was to create the demo reel and animations that would be seen on the website - it was game on.
PAINTING THE PATTERNS
Working closely with our graphic designer and creative lead, Liza Marino, we set down to create a series of assets that could be re-used and repurposed for both the website and our marketing purposes. She showed me a series of mood boards and color palettes that gave me a sense of what to run with. I began to illustrate a series of patterns that accurately represented the variety of courses and opportunities offered by our studio. I combined organic shapes and lines to represent are more artistic offerings like design and creative writing, while more angular shapes symbolized our technical offerings like robotics and computer science.
The blend and intersection of these patterns was tanamount to the studio itself - a space where creatives across all disciplines could find common ground across their distinct talents and build something together.
ANIMATION, WEBSITE & BUTTONS
With our basic color blocks set, our product and dev teams began to set up our main studio website using Replit AI, integrating our patterns into our banners, icons, headers and footers. We wanted to further enhance the experience by creating an animated entrance to our website, which would include our main logo glyph and letters. I wanted the animation to be dynamic and diverse like our course offerings, but it had to be quick in terms of execution. I repurposed the patterns I made and had them form via procedural liquid transformations iinto our cog-wheel logo; meanwhile, I applied the same animation technique onto our slab serif fonts to create a rainbow splatter of multi-colored paints forming into letters. Once my animation was done & packaged into an mp4, our dev teams vibe coded it into our website via Replit Ai.
You can check our full website here: https://aops-studio.replit.app/
PRINTED MATERIALS
As our dev teams added the finishing touches to our website, Liza was hard at work integrating my designs onto posters we hanged all around the office to advertise our team's hard work. In less than a week, we had created a movement of creative problem solvers. The patterns also became the camouflage coating our paper airplane designs, which became a symbol of our playful spirit of creation. These planes would also make their debut at our end of week presentation, where all of our Hackathon ideas would take flight in one final display.
WINNING
After working 10-12 hour days for a week, we won the gold and took the "Best In Show" prize for our 2025 Hackathon competition. The concept we had at the beginning of the week seemed beyond crazy, but time and time again after these competitions, I keep re-discovering how much people can create in such short amount of time given their strong conviction to an idea.
CREDITS
Creative Director: Jack Sanchez
Curriculum Developers: Jeremy Copeland, Malcom Eckl,
Tim Handley, Kathy Cordeiro
Robotics Expert: Shawn Murali
Finance Department: Jessica Hardy
Developer(s): Iana Borova, Jefferson Chen, Phyllis Xu, Joseph Barron
Product Designers: Asia Maung, Tiffany Streitenberger
3D Designer: Tobin de Korne
Graphic Design Lead: Liza Marino
Motion Design & Illustration: Nestor Tomaselli
Head of Data: Meryls Huhn
VP of Marketing: Eric Olsen
Theatre Coordination: Josie Gerk
Actors: Amanda Reilly, Phyllis Xu, Jack Sanchez