Rive Animated Bird Character – UI Interaction States

🐦 Rive Animated Bird Character – UI Interaction States

Client Brief:
The client requested a 2D vector bird character with a friendly, imaginative, and playful personality, to be used across various animated states on a website. The character needed to be visually consistent across all animations and reflect the brand’s cheerful and welcoming tone. I was responsible for designing the character, animating six distinct states in Rive, and delivering production-ready files for developer handoff.

📝 Project Breakdown

🎯 Objective:

Create a plump, rounded, expressive bird character with large eyes, small wings, and a playful tail. The character needed to support six unique animated states in Rive, reflecting various user interactions across the website.

🎨 Design Direction:

The client shared a design brief (attached) outlining key requirements:

• Bird personality: Cute, imaginary, rounded, expressive.

• Color Palette: Subtle use of Happiest brand colors:
  Teal: #00C9A7 | Orchid Pink: #F72585 | Cool Gray: #A1A5AA | Deep Indigo: #1D1E33

💡 Animation States

🦴 Bone Setup (Rigging in Rive)

I used a clean and minimal bone rig structure inside Rive to support expressive but lightweight animation:

• Main bones: Head, wings (L/R), tail, body.

• Controls: Independent wing flaps, tail bounce, and head tilt.

• Consistent deformation to ensure no stretching or distortion across animations.

• Smart parenting and constraints for reusable animations and modular tweaks.

🎞 Animation Previews (GIFs)

Each of the six states was carefully animated and exported as separate GIFs for stakeholder review and final implementation.

Previews:

1. ✅ Fly In

2. 💤 Idle Float

3. 👀 Peek

4. ✨ Memory Interaction

5. 📦 Completion (CTA Interaction)

6. ❗ Error/Fallback

(You can embed the GIFs next to their respective descriptions or in a carousel-style layout.)

📁 Final Deliverables

• ✅ 1 Consistent Character Design (SVG)

• ✅ 6 Rive Animation Files (.riv) — one for each interaction

• ✅ Separate export-ready assets for each use case

• ✅ Delivered with clear layer/bone naming for easy developer integration

• ❌ Nesting artboards not required per client brief

💬 Client Feedback

“Absolutely loved how the bird turned out — fun, expressive, and exactly how we imagined. The consistency across all animations and clean file delivery made it easy for our dev team to implement. Great job!”

👨‍💻 Developer Notes

• All .riv files are optimized for web use.

• Each animation loops or plays as specified in the brief.

• Components and bones are clearly labeled for easier runtime manipulation or scripting (e.g., triggering peek on hover).

• No nesting or masking tricks were used to ensure compatibility across environments.