How I Decided to Stop Worrying and Love the Burger
Hello I'm glowburger, and welcome to my sauce of consciousness
Hi! I’m glowburger
I’m a Product Designer at a corporate startup by day and I produce 3D animated art content by night (and weekends).
In early 2022, I co-started a passion project with burger606 called ‘Blessed Burgers’ — where I learned many things from scratch like web app design, graphic design, 3D animation/character rigging, video editing, formulating business pitch decks, and so on …
Incidentally, I embarked on my first full-time role as a Product Designer at the end of 2022. The pace of my iterative learning was accelerated through simultaneously doing both my professional and personal projects.
I’m starting this journal for my design processes
A lot of people say, creating art is only half (or even less) of an artist’s job.
As I was building up my design portfolio and 3D skills, I’ve realised that my documentation of processes through twitter/X threads has become lost over time (I still look for what I write because there are so many technical things to remember as a 3D creator).
I am an eternal optimist!
I come from an Architecture design background, survived 5 years of weekly assaults on my self-esteem (i.e. design critiques), and I’m growing my skillsets in both UIUX design and 3D procedural art.
People tell me that it’s a wasted opportunity to not practice as an architect, but I think it’s a sunk-cost fallacy. I see it as re-packaging critical design thinking skills and knowledge of case studies and transferring them to other design disciplines. I believe it’s important to not box yourself up unnecessarily, or at least that is what I tell myself for now as a bulwark against other people’s unsolicited disappointment.
Here is a list of content that I will be writing …
I am planning to flesh out some of the old documentation on processes:
Basic character animation rigging with Rigify
Parametric/procedural modelling with blender3D’s geonodes that saved me tons of time
Case studies on products/app features I have worked on thus far (including blessedburgers.co)
Lessons on building in public (thank you buildspace)
Camera tricks: using Empty for camera animation, making renders look good with HDRIs and Depth-of-field
Conducting user discovery interviews or usability testing plans as a Product Designer
User insights software comparison (Dovetail, Betafi)
Things that I am personally still experimenting with (welcome any tips):
Simulation nodes, light groups, subsurface scattering in blender3D
[UX] Design systems — learnings from documenting a corporate startup’s design system for 2 weeks
Growing as an artist on Solana
Learning more about web3
Information Architecture stuff that I have learned over a year to ensure that front-end engineers will not hate me (as a Product Designer)
Hopefully, these will be topics that anyone starting out in UX/Product Design and 3D creation will find useful.
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I am also addictedactive on X.