Hyped for Hype4

Me being the genius I am, I decided to not look at the course requirements before I showed up to class the first day for what I had just assumed would be some Adobe centered curriculum. Boy was I wrong. I knew the time would come where I would probably need to buckle down and buy a new laptop. I didn’t think it would come so soon though. This class was centered around a program called Hype. Something thing that I’ve never heard about before and was a little bit more difficult than I had expected it would be for me. I have come to value immensely through the opportunities that I can bring to being a designer and now that I’ve completed my trial run I feel much more confident in being able to use this tool effectively.

At the beginning of the semester, we picked a topic that would be at the center of our design. The project was introduced as an informational kiosk that hypothetically would be standing in either a convention, a museum, a movie theater, or anywhere else you would see a touchscreen kiosk. I am mediately thought that doing a kiosk for a convention for a popular media company that I listen to daily, would be a really interesting opportunity. It is also a company that has a lot of assets when it comes to video, pictures, audio, and even movies and anime. That is one thing that I learned early on in this program was to pick things that you can easily obtain assets for.

I decided to choose Rooster Teeth, a company that produces mostly Youtube and Podcast content that is centered around gaming and pop culture. They do other stuff but that's what they are mostly known for.

Figuring it all out

For what I know so far, it seems very similar to something you would use for prototyping. It came across as similar to Adobe After Effects merged with Adobe Premiere and a little bit of Adobe XD. At the very start, I knew that this program was going to give me a run for my money.

The layering system… trash.
Moving items that aren't going to snap to the sides of the canvas is horrible.
No real support for creating anything but basic shapes and lines.

I realized that if you really wanted to sit down and do something complex graphics-wise, you should just do it somewhere else and pull it over from there.

The Design

What I had decided to do for the layout, was have 3 tabs on top that all were used to complete different requirements that we had for the project. We had to do different transitions, hover states, buttons, and moving text that is backgrounded by audio.

Infographic

I decided to go with an infographic that was a timeline that spanned across multiple key years that Rooster Teeth was at its peak. The idea was you click on the year that you want to know more about, and then it slides down into the year that is highlighted. The year will show you a bunch of pictures that were taken from conventions or key videos or moments in Rooster Teeth history and a brief description of what had happened that year that was important for the growth of the company.

Quiz

Doing a Quiz seemed like a pretty good idea. If this kiosk was in a convention or something, I imagined that people could have a lot of fun going through and seeing how well they know the company! I included some softballs in there and added a way to tell if you were right or wrong, then needing to click the correct answer in order to move onto the next question.

My experience with Hype could have been better. Much of the time was spent with hours of troubleshooting. Their exporting isn’t exactly the most straightforward process linking everything together. Using an iPad pro to test the functionality was pretty hit or miss as well. Overall I think Hype could be a great option in the future once they work out some of the kinks that can make working with it really frustrating. I personally would probably only use it in very specific circumstances. Stick with Premiere and After Effect especially if you don’t have an iMac at hand.

Brady Hale is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley
University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to (Hype Final) in the (DGM 2280 Course) and representative of the skills learned.