Art Director
& 3D Lead
The following visuals and links touch on art direction, strategy, and conceptual design frameworks I worked on toward the end of my time at Instagram. The team I first arrived on at Instagram was a very different than the team I left. In the beginning, the team was very focused on extending reality in the Instagram Story camera, think AR face masks in front camera, and AR mini worlds and characters, utilizing emerging tech such as body tracking, line tracking, and depth estimation in the back camera. However, as directive changed we focused less on augmented reality in camera and instead more linearly supported the Reels product. We lent our design talents to product design, ui focused, Reels super-tools to be used inside the Instagram camera.
Cartoon GAN
The Cartoon GAN work stream was the predecessor to the first launched ML powered effect “Smile” on Instagram. We delivered a dataset of 11,000 3D rendered images to train the model used in both effects. I functioned as a 3D Lead as well as provided art direction to our vendor. Click the link to get an in depth look of the lift of this project.
Avatars on Instagram
-
Dance with Avatars
is an Instagram camera effect in which users place their personalized 3D Avatars in the real world and select from a variety of dances to bring them to life.
-
Avatar Vision Development
was an initiative on IG to help the north star vision of quality we wanted Meta Avatars to hit before fully integrating the product on Instagram as well developing best entry points for the product to live that
Templates
Design Framework
Templates are just one form of Auto Created Reels on Instagram. As our objective at this time was to increase the quality of the Reels creation process. A process that users found lengthy, complex and occasionally buggy. The idea being instead of users having to “cold start” we wanted to supercharge the process by allowing users to create Reels they were happy with with less options and take only a fraction of the time. So the plan became creating a series of Templates however we wanted to be sure we were making Templates that actually solved users needs. Templates that would help users in creating more of the content they wanted to share, not content we wanted them to share. So, we leaned on data to inform what kind of Templates would aid in users creation process most and with that data I created a design framework so that as we continued on brainstorming and designing out an entire suite of Templates we would make we would always be ensured they mapped to ways we knew users were already hiring Instagram Reels for. Also visualized a user flow for what that creation experience could be.
