ASP Wrocław. Student faculty app.

A student-led project with a real client

I was still a student at the Mixed Media Arts faculty when the project started. It wasn't a class assignment. It was a real commission from one of the faculty professors, done in partnership with Politechnika Wrocławska, whose engineering students built the app while a team of ASP Wrocław design students built the experience. About six months, a proper cross-institution collaboration with a real release at the end.

I already had some UX/UI experience by that point, so I ended up informally helping guide the designers who were earlier in the craft. But my own scope on the project was specific: animation and interaction design.

Designing the motion system

A mobile app for an art faculty can't feel like a corporate information tool. The students using it spend every day making things, so the app itself had to carry some of that sensibility. My job was the motion layer: the transitions between screens, the micro-interactions on taps and swipes, the subtle animations that give the interface personality without getting in the way of a student checking their timetable at 8am.

I designed each animation in After Effects and exported them as Lottie JSON files so they could ship directly in the app at high fidelity without blowing up performance. Lottie was the right call for a small student team: lightweight, developer-friendly, and flexible enough to let me iterate on motion without asking the engineering team to rewrite anything.

Motion with a job, not a showreel

The easiest thing to do with animation in an art-school app is overdo it. Art students appreciate craft, but they also want the app to work. Every animation had to earn its place: guiding attention between states, softening navigation transitions, signalling when new content had arrived. Nothing purely decorative. The goal was an app that felt considered, not one that felt overdesigned.

Helping the less-experienced designers on the team

Most of the designers on the team were at the start of their UX/UI careers. I'd already been designing for a couple of years by this point, so I ended up informally coaching on the basics (file structure in Figma, naming components, working with developers, thinking in flows rather than screens) alongside my own animation work. It was my first time operating in anything like a senior role inside a team, and it clarified that part of design work at any level is making the people around you better at design work.

Shipping and the Rector's Award

The app shipped, and it's still live. More importantly, it actually works as intended: students use it to find what's happening in the faculty without going through the general ASP Wrocław website. The project received the Rector's Award at ASP Wrocław, the academy's formal recognition for student work.

Looking back, the project is the one where I first worked across disciplines (designers, engineers, two institutions, a real external client) and the one where I first leaned fully into motion design as part of a product. Both have stayed with me.

By the end of the release, around 70% of faculty students had downloaded it.