Soma

Inspiration

Soma is a reaction to the uncertainty that we face as university students, both during our navigation of the day to day, as well as the uncertainty of long-term career planning. It stems from the realization that there are times where even the most concrete facts may be a result of our own delusions. What if there was a way to have more clarity of the stuff happening in my OWN brain?

Soma is a reminder that our thoughts are not reality. Our actions are.

Learnings

One of the biggest learnings throughout the event has been the conquering of perfectionism.

This was particularly true during the ideation phase. There are so many topics and ideas to sift through, but we gave ourselves such a headache discussing the nuance of each idea ad nauseum. At a certain point, we had to say enough was enough. Time was ticking, and we had to learn to move on and take action, even if the idea wasn't 100% perfect.

Another lesson and challenge we faced was in communication and conflict resolution. When talented designers work, they have reasoning behind their decisions. When they work together as a team, they have to learn how to discuss these decisions in a productive manner. Over the last three days, we had to learn how to remove our personal feelings from our work and be able to freely discuss ideas and differing opinions while making sure everyone felt heard and valued.

Building Process

As experienced designers, we each used the tools that we were familiar with. The primary tool for Soma was Figma (obviously), but many of our custom assets, including logo, gradients and 3d assets were designed and prepared in Photoshop & Illustrator. Shout out to David for his hard work!

One of the biggest challenges we faced was in the making of our demo video, which we decided to make in After Effects. One of our members, Jinni, had minimal experience with After Effects, having used it only once before. Over the course of half a day, she learned the depths of After Effects and put together our really great demonstration video!

Another great aspect of the building process is attention to detail. The culmination of all the small details really gives Soma life. Things like UI animation in our prototype, slide transitions in our pitch deck, and even custom sound design and music by our very own Kyle Jhong left us proud of the end result. An unexpected hurdle we faced was writing. The amount of polished writing required to pitch idea quickly became overwhelming, and it needed to be delegated proactively or else we would have put it off forever.

Conclusion

Thank you to the Figma team for the opportunity and bringing the four of us together and participate! Overall, this project was a labor of love over long days and late nights, and we are happy and proud to stand behind what we have created.

We look forward to hearing what the judging panel thinks about Soma.

Best, David, Jinni, Kyle, and Elsie

Built With

• aftereffects
• figma
• logicpro