Yolanda Emmatya

PETSTAR

Bringing Joy to Screens: The Design Behind PetStar’s Playful Interactions

PROCESS HIGHLIGHTS

Tackling the Challenges and Shaping the Experience

Overview

PetStar is a mobile app that transforms pet videos into playful, music-driven lip-sync performances. Think Smule, but with pets as the stars. Whether it’s a silly video for your kids or something your grandparents will laugh at, PetStar turns everyday moments with pets into tiny music shows.

Timeline

2022 - 2023

Tools

Adobe Photoshop
Adobe After Effect

Notion

Responsibilities

Designed unique visual concepts for each song theme and genre
Created background assets and motion effects to enhance the performance
Ensured designs enhanced the pet’s visibility and didn’t distract from their performance
Collaborating with the art team.
Created animated motion elements to match music rhythm and energy

BACKGROUND

The Woof Behind the Why

PetStar began with a simple idea, pets are part of the family, and families love sharing their antics. Parents, kids, even grandparents often record funny or cute pet moments, and PetStar aimed to turn those clips into something even more entertaining. The goal wasn’t just about pet videos, it was about creating joy and connection around them. But syncing a song to a pet video alone wasn’t enough, the visuals needed to elevate the moment and make it feel like a family-worthy performance.

CHALLENGES

The Bumps in the Road

Designing for Pets, Not Just Music

The visuals had to enhance the performance, not distract from it. My challenge was to design and motion it in a way that made the experience more expressive, more fun, without overwhelming the main character (the pet).

My approach: I carefully placed and timed all visual elements, like floating hearts, disco lights, or themed prop, so the pet remained the focal point. I always previewed animations with pet content to check for clarity and harmony.

Every Song Demanded a Custom World

Each song was its own creative challenge. I had to think about genre, tone, and movement, and then build a short animation experience that felt complete and joyful in just a few seconds. It wasn’t just picking visuals, it was giving them motion and attitude.

My solution: I built moodboards and visual references for each song, selecting color palettes, motion accents, and visual “moods” that felt right. This helped set a consistent tone and guide asset creation

Fast Pace, Many Tracks

With new songs being added weekly, time management and consistency were key.

REFLECTION

Designing, Then Discovering

Even without animating the pets themselves, I learned how to design around non-human characters with personality and care. PetStar challenged me to both conceptualize and animate visuals that feel joyful, rhythmic, and shareable, something a family could laugh at together. Designing for entertainment meant thinking about timing, mood, and emotion, not just the user, but the whole household as the audience.

This project taught me how technical animation, emotional design, and user interaction can blend into one cohesive experience. I learned to translate abstract problems like, “How can a chatbot feel human?” into practical, creative solutions.

It also sparked a deeper interest in the world of digital design, how they can work together to create engaging and human-centered experiences. This project made me want to explore more tech-driven design challenges in the future. Looking ahead, I’d love to explore more adaptive character behaviors, like visual cues that react to user tone or real-time sentiment or small emotional feedback loops to make future interactions feel more natural, expressive, and human.

RESULT

Turning Play Into Recognition

Generated over 50+ visual and motion design concepts tailored to a wide range of music genres, moods, and moments, helping shape PetStar into a playful, shareable app experience that brought pet videos to life in fun, stage worthy ways. The work I contributed supported the app’s goal of becoming a joyful, family-friendly platform, which led to PetStar being recognized in the Google Play Best of 2022 awards under both Best for Fun and Best Hidden Gems categories.