Crab with Mission: Making Professional Conference playful | Rive

For the annual NASP inSPire 2026 Conference by the National Association of Specialty Pharmacy (USA), I was invited to create and animate a charming Maryland blue crab character. The character’s mission was clear: make the conference app feel playful and engaging, bringing a little fun and personality into an otherwise serious professional environment. The Crab also welcomed conference guests on the large screen in the main conference hall, entertaining the audience between speakers and presentations.

After diving into the research and exploring the materials provided by the client, I found the perfect role for the Crab: a friendly lighthouse keeper. The lighthouse was already part of NASP’s visual language, representing the organization’s core principles. This made the lighthouse keeper a natural fit for a character whose purpose was to guide, assist, and accompany conference attendees throughout their experience. In addition to character design and animation, I contributed to the web application interface, taking responsive design principles into account.

I created several UI design layouts and provided consulting on usability and user experience. For the character, I created a collection of Rive animations, including: -) Friendly greetings -) Happy and celebratory reactions -) Several variations of speech animations -) Waiting states designed to encourage users to interact with the app After creating conventional Waiting-with-a-clock animation, I explored several playful scenarios inspired by the conference’s seaside location. Since the conference takes place practically on the oceanfront, I decided to bring the surrounding environment into the character’s world. The Crab plays in the sand and builds sandcastles. He also jumps around enthusiastically, tossing a bright, colorful beach ball into the air. There’s just one small problem… Crab claws aren't exactly designed for catching balls. So every now and then, the ball goes… POP! These little moments of unexpected humor were designed to give the character more personality and make interactions feel less predictable.

To showcase NASP’s key principles and slogans, I created a small cartoon airplane flying over the beach, pulling a banner behind it. It became another playful way to introduce important organizational messages without interrupting the lighthearted atmosphere of the character experience.

I created the vector character in Sketch and brought it to life using Rive, building the animations around a state machine to make the character’s behavior responsive to different interactions and situations. For the presentation video with sound, created for the large conference screen, I used DaVinci Resolve. The result was a character that went beyond being a visual mascot: the Maryland Blue Crab became a small digital host, guide, and source of unexpected fun, helping bring a more human and playful touch to the conference experience naspnet.org