Gaja

My Role

Graphic Designer
UI/UX Designer
Illustrator

Project Duration

Sep 2018 – Mar 2020

Tools

Figma
Adobe Suite
Procreate
Clipstudio Paint EX
Wix

Overview

Gaja is a design studio which develops an avatar-focused social tool that enables individuals to make meaningful connections.

During the time I was working with Gaja, I designed their branding assets, some parts of their digital product and digital assets (avatars).

Problem statement

At social events, people exchanging contacts, but afterwards, the follow up often don’t happen and many contacts get discarded over time. People may be frustrated to connect because the contact details only tells what people do instead of who they are. Many opportunities are lost due to the lacking of impression, not to mention the environmental impact for the waste of resources on printing materials.

How might we help people generate the initial “spark” and build meaningful connections by providing easy-to-use tools to express their authentic self?

Research

Competitive Analysis

Since there are no similar products on the market, so I chose two that’s the closest to Gaja’s features and conducted SWOT analysis.

User personas

I consolidated the company’s research result on the target audience into categories and build the personas.

Flows

The App Flow

Gaja app facilitates users to set up their presence and exchange contacts with others seamlessly.

The Website Flow

Gaja’s website assist the customers both informatively and functionally, the first half of the website serves the former purpose, and the second half of the website is the heart of Gaja’s service where it provides our customer with a category of avatars that sync with the account and Gaja App.

Custom Avatar flow

My experience in illustration came in handy when constructing a flow for Gaja’s Custom Avatar, which is essentially a commission service, so I created this flow that helps the customers to be clearer in expressing their needs on the customisation, and for us to match the project to the suitable artist, and for the project manager to quantify those needs into pricing.

Wireframes

Gaja’s webstie is designed to be highly illustrated in a story-telling way to showcase the work and service it provides, and it also needs to give a clear picture of the ethos of the company.

Graphic Design & Illustration

Gaja Comic

Story-telling is part of Gaja’s marketing strategy, I put my own experience in building comic series to practice, including the storyboarding, composition and illustrating.

Logos

I designed two logos for Gaja, they also act as mascots and main characters in the comic story. Body Language and Psychology of Colours were considered in the process.

Avatars & Banners

The digital assets of Gaja consists of a wide range of illustrations, I worked with a team of talented artists who are all based remotely, we work solo on most projects, and occasionally collaborate with each other to achieve the best result.

As avatars and banners, constant testing is required since their end use is on various social media and professional platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Zoom.

Conclusion

It was exciting working with Gaja from the ground up, we set out to build a social tool for people to make meaningful contact, and we achieved building an app and a website with 50+ unique avatars for people to express themselves.

After conducting user testings, we successfully launched Gaja as a crowdfunding project. However unfortunately it was affected by the global Pandemic in 2020 and was put on the shelf since.

My biggest takeaway was the consolidation of the commission flow, it enabled me to challenge myself to SOP the process that I didn’t think was possible, and the result saved a lot of time for both the customers and the company.

Also the collaboration between illustrators achieved many wonderful artworks, due to the trust, open-mindedness and good communication.

Louise Wei