The Crimson City once flourished as a grand, densely populated city that boasted military prowess and entertainment. The city was in conflict with the neighboring city of Leons, and in the hopes of gaining an edge in their stalemate work began on a secret bioweapon. A monster of huge proportions with equally monstrous weapons. It was armed with every sort of infection they could think of, massive claws and teeth made from bone and metal alike, and featured an impossibly long tail that ended in an oversized spike shooter. It was comical in concept, nerve-wracking in person, and an end to all ends when it woke up. Before it managed to escape, the Crimson City’s shields were put up, trapping the beast and every person inside indestructible walls. No one has managed to get in since, and few even dare to consider the idea.

The sheer excitement I felt when I saw this prompt and realized I could make an assignment based off Hollowgrove! Whew. Grafx2 has two main drawing modes, one is for animating and the other for drawing with layers. It’s very limiting in that aspect, but it’s very useful and easy to make small animations and/or gifs. I used a simple red box as the background for each frame and added text over them. I wanted to tell a condensed and vague story of what happened in the Crimson city of Hollowgrove, so I felt that having each frame feature only a few words would leave some details to the imagination. Halfway through I had the idea to have the colors slowly brighten and dim like siren lights, though I’m not super pleased with how it turned out. I could’ve done a smoother gradient that goes across all frames rather than the three colors I chose.

The Metaverse is a concept that seems daring and like the next step in human evolution to many, while remaining a potential nightmare situation to others. Currently, I’m not sure where I stand. Fortunately, though, it’s always fun to joke around about The Zuck. For this assignment, I wanted to establish a dystopian world that has shifted to essentially strictly virtual reality, where Mark Zuckerberg has capitalized on the absence of people out in the “real world.” While there are plenty of people who genuinely believe Zuckerberg has plans for total world domination, this is only a joke and I promise I’m not in on any of the conspiracies.

I did face a few challenges while creating this, such as getting good timing for the gif to allow time to read the slides while not having them take too long. Ultimately, I think I was able to achieve a decent middle ground, though I think some may need to watch it a few times to read everything.

Inspired by the excess of whining in the Vignelli Canon, as discussed in my recent post reflecting on the reading, I decided to do a funny take on the Animated GIF assignment Splain That Dystopia In Six Slides, for 3 stars. A funny take with a point though: we can’t take design TOO seriously. People still need to read.

It was pretty difficult to navigate compared to my other GIF, even though it just used makeagif.com, so I did not go as full-on in the tutorial.

Step 1: Slideshow

Step 2: Download Each Slide as a JPEG

Step 3: Add Your Slides as JPEGs