A few visual explorations from the world of Astral.

We created these while developing the art direction for the project, exploring how the product, photography, distortion and identity could all speak the same visual language.

Some of them eventually found their way into the Astral experience, and became part of the world we built around it.

nice

rediscovered some old favorites of mine, my first real ventures into any sort of motion design. these were our primary advertisement visuals for a private, fiction-based writing community around this time some 18 months ago. these featured archetypes that were requested as connections for members onsite to spice up our plot, offering an insight into the depth everyone has hiding behind their curated grids & posts, even if only in seeing what apps they have running in the background of their device, what notifications are enabled.

i have so much more material in the arsenal where this style comes from, & given our community's focus on interpersonal dynamics' impacts thanks to pressures from both social & news media sources (in spite of their potential unreliability, exaggerations, etc.), i haven't found a design system since that encapsulated the sort of 'ERROR 404' / 'uncanny valley' energy that we've always gone for in our storytelling, but in spite of content warning tags for glitching & potential eyestrain? lashback from external sources was far too severe to keep this style up & running for as long as i'd have liked.

what are your thoughts? any favorites of the four shown below? good start to an unconventional little case study, perhaps?

The ERROR 404 / uncanny valley angle is a clever way to visualize interpersonal dynamics without illustrating them literally. My favorite of the four is the top right, that cracked type treatment does a lot of storytelling on its own. Was the eyestrain pushback coming from...