DRAMAFEVER & DF NEXT
UI/UX Product Designer & Programmer, Warner Bros Digital Labs (fka. Dramafever)
June 2016 – November 2018
OVERVIEW
Dramafever was a video streaming website and app dedicated to offering premium Korean and Chinese drama content to its audience, including securing and subtitling popular licensed releases as well producing television dramas of its own. Prior to being acquired by Warner Bros, Dramafever was in-progress with a variety of projects aiming to revitalize and strengthen its brand, including a full site style and functionality revamp (“DF Next”) that I assisted in through design and execution.
Rebrand & Design System
When I was first brought on to the team, Dramafever was preparing for a full rebrand known internally as “DFNext”. The service was on its seventh year of operation and was in desperate need for a tech and design overhaul. To replace outdated features across platforms, the first step was to identify and define what made up the core essence of the DF brand across each device and componentize it for easy reference and replication by all involved teams. Creation of a clear visual language that can be accessed and used by everyone was essential for this demanding task; a couple of designers and I made it our goal to complete this while working on our other projects.
After the inventory, the isolated parts were divided by their device type (iOS, Android, Web) and then further sorted by typography, color, components (global UI that appears in multiple views and make up pieces to a greater whole), and modules (core groups of components that may be view-specific). The guide was then documented and distributed via Abstract (previously was backed up on Box), then implemented as a Sketch Library by various team members.
Web Development
A major part of my time at Dramafever was defined by my interest and ability to bridge design and code. DFNext's was an ambitious venture, and it required a lot of communication between different teams to coordinate. To aid this, I not only helped with providing design comps for various views, but I was also part of the front-end team implementing those various changes.
Using a variety of languages and tools (HTML, CSS, JS/jQuery, AngularJS, Gulp, GitHub, Jasmine, etc), I contributed production level code to the site, developing reusable components and modules based on our existing design system as well as coming up with practical solves that minimized sacrifices to the original design for technical and implementation problems that we encountered.
Mascot Redesign (Stickers)
With the new brand came the need to revamp the mascot to reflect the fresh, youthful look that we wanted to achieve. In an attempt to imbue our Pig Rabbit with the appeal of eastern mascots, such as those of Line and Kakao, and have it resonate with our Asian-drama fans, we took three styles that two other coworkers and I contributed and shared it with our userbase in the form of a poll.
Style A returned as the most popular, so we set to work creating a character turnaround sheet and a series of animations using After Effects and Illustrator that would later become chat stickers that users of our app could use. Later down the line came the idea that we could grow the mascot family to be something larger to suit more use cases and give more personality and context to our two-eared friend – and thus was the birth of Pig Rabbit and friends. For this project, I contributed the design of a small but sassy crocodile who views Pig Rabbit as her rival.
