A couple months ago we discovered one of the most beautiful material design animation we’ve seen so far: Replace. And it’s not just us, the MaterialUp community loved it just as much and up-voted it until they couldn’t anymore. It was amazing to see this happen – I mean we had never heard of Zee Young before, the creator behind it, and fair enough it was his first attempt at using Material Design.

But… it didn’t happen just like that. Here’s the story of Zee Young’s journey in becoming a talented designer, and how contemplation before anything else is the foundation of his creative process.

Hi Zee! Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m from China and I’m a UI designer, which includes interface design, icon design, animation design and user interaction design.

I’m a self-taught designer, I started with Photoshop taught by my best friend KKWJ. I studied the basic design skill for 5 days, then began to do lots practice on my own for six months. And after that I was able to start my designer career.

That’s very inspiring for every future designer out there! Your animation “Replace” is breathtaking. How did you come up with this idea?

Actually, the background illustration is for my company project that I have to call off.

At first I simply just wanted to show this illustration. But it felt a little monotonous, so I added some elements to make it a complete piece of work. About the creativity of the paper plane, I had the user’s point of view in mind, giving them surprises and make it as cool as possible at the same time.

Did you use After Effects? How did you learn?

Yes I did. I taught myself how to use it. There are a lot of tutorials available online and I just focus on things that I can use for my job like animation in After Effects I think is necessary to learn. The 12 Principles of Animation in After Effects tutorial gives you a preliminary understanding of the concept.

And where do you go for inspiration?

My inspiration comes from many places: Dribbble, Behance, 500px, MaterialUp or Best App. Any beautiful work would become my inspiration.

There are so many great designers all around the world, here are a few of the best ones I find: Kenya Hara from Japan (Art Director at Muji), Dieter Rams from Germany, Paco Xiao from China, Mike | Creative Mints from Czech Republic and Asher from Pakistan.

That’s quite a diverse crowd! Tell us, how do you start a design, what is your creative process?

When I have an idea, I will take quite some time to create it. I first start thinking about what I want and then make a rough draft on paper.

To give you an idea, for “Replace” I spent two weeks thinking about it and just 6 hours actually creating it. At first, I was hoping to have an interesting dynamic effect so I tried to follow the principles of physics, allowing users to understand the animation easily. Only at the end did I choose a paper airplane on a floating button. And following the 12 principles of animation, I made the object movement looks smooth and natural. Most of the time that’s how it takes place.

“Replace” is heavily inspired by Material Design, what first attracted you to exploring the new language?

When I was saw Android 5.0 released and started using it on my device, I was attracted by it. It’s simple, beautiful, extreme. With Material Design iterations are fast, the style is lightweight and efficient in conveying complex hierarchy. There’s a big emphasis on facilitating work between designers, it allows faster responses and accessibility.

I’ve also noticed you created some stunning Skeuomorphism designs. Do you plan on designing more user interfaces using Material Design principles or do you still prefer Skeuomorphism?

I’ll be doing both. As we saw, many great designers were making beautiful Skeuomorphism design before Flat design became popular. Only then it started being used on various devices, and more flat design came out.

In my opinion, any beautiful thing is worth studying and taking the time to explore it, I even try to combine them. For example, in “Replace” when the plane flies out of the background and flies back, you can see that it’s a three-dimensional movement :)

Thanks Zee, we can’t wait to see more!

Make sure to check out Zee’s work on MaterialUp and Dribbble or follow him on Twitter.

Also, if you want to have fun and play with it, Nikolay Talanov made it happen :)

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