KCON LA

When Figma released its new motion tool in late June, I knew I had to try it. Figma Motion is simple and intuitive, yet the more I used it, the more I realized it would take multiple projects to fully understand what it can do.

My first project in Figma Motion was for a class assignment: a sting animation for a convention or music festival, built around animated type. I chose KCON LA because K-pop is something that constantly inspires me to design. KCON is one of the biggest K-pop festivals in the world, three days of concerts, fans and Korean culture at the LA Convention Center and Crypto.com Arena. I wanted a sting that felt as loud and energetic as the festival itself.

I planned the sting as a sequence of big type moments: the KCON LA title, the festival dates, a stacked "LINEUP" and two of the acts, TOMORROW X TOGETHER and &TEAM. It ends on the KCON logo. Each frame had to work on its own as a bold typographic composition before I thought about how it would move.

My original designs were static, and the colors didn't quite match the feeling of KCON. I first used an RGB halftone, but it felt flat and a little too clean. When I discovered the CMYK halftone shader in Figma, I knew exactly how to portray the excitement of K-pop fans. The overlapping cyan, magenta and yellow dots gave everything a printed, poster-like texture, like merch or a concert flyer. And the saturated palette finally matched the energy of the festival.

Something in me just clicked when I found the right colors, and I knew exactly how I wanted everything to animate. Shapes sweep across the frame to reveal each word, "LINEUP" repeats down the screen like a chant, and the artist names build letter by letter before everything resolves on the KCON logo. After a quick critique from my professor and classmates, I tightened the timing and ended up with a beautiful 10-second type sting. It was also the project that made me excited to keep pushing what Figma Motion can do.