Meet CTW’s UI/UX Designer, Huang Wenxin
Path to CTW
This is our series on the team working at CTW.
Today, we’ll spend some time with our talented and artistic UI/UX Designer, Wenxin.
Tell us about yourself
I’m from Shenzhen — the fourth biggest city in China. It’s kind of the connecting point between Hong Kong and the mainland. The two cities are basically next to each other. I lived there until I graduated from Shenzhen University a couple of years ago.?
At university, I majored in English and minored in Visual Communication Design. Since I’ve moved to Japan, I feel like my English is slipping away. I’m here talking to you and the flow is just not the same. Use it or lose it!
I moved to Japan in 2020 because I wanted to work as a designer. In my opinion, you can’t really be a good designer any more if you don’t have a global vision. You need to expose yourself to all the different styles and trends that go around the global market. I think that Japanese design has become very recognizable and famous all over the world. I’ve loved it since I was a little girl.
That’s what got me into Japanese culture. I like it very much. I’ve been watching Japanese anime and playing Japanese games forever. It was very big in my community growing up.
My favorite show was Cardcaptor Sakura. Most girls I knew were into it when they were young. It’s about a schoolgirl finding magic powers and transforming into powerful Cardcaptors. She and her friends all have fabulous outfits and the visuals of the show are wonderful.
As for my favorite games? Definitely Final Fantasy. I love the high fantasy vibes of the others but I love Cloud so much. His story, his look, his character, everything.?
What do you do in your free time???
I like to play games.
Okay, so on the PC side, recently, I've been playing Apex Legends. It's very fast paced and fun. It gets my heart pumping. And for mobile games, I usually play Genshin Impact. I really like the gameplay and the artistic style. It’s very vibrant. I also play some other Chinese titles.
When I’m chilling, I like playing romance games. Games where there’s a love-story element.
So I like a little fast-paced action and a little mellow relaxing.
What brought you to CTW?
Well, when I came to Japan, I first went to a Japanese language school for a year. I wanted to improve my fluency and make some friends too. After finishing the course, I went to Musashino Art University where I'm still a student. In my course, I'm studying design informatics — specifically, visual interactive design.
This is all about how people interact with computers. We measure and study movements and actions to see what people are actually doing. UI/UX is just one of the parts of design informatics. So I'm working on finishing my degree while also working here at CTW part time.
But I’m going to become a full-time member when I graduate in April! I hadn’t heard of the company before. I’d basically just put my work up on a designer website to advertise my work and got headhunted. After only two months, I’ve learned so much. And I’m even already working on a really important project!
My job is mostly working on the G123 platform’s UI/UX, I work a little on the games side of things but mostly it’s the website and the platform. The G123 platform is super versatile but it’s UI/UX is outdated. We’re working hard to make it so that it’s more in line with modern design principles and that each play-type is accommodated. At the moment, everything follows the cell phone portrait mode. On PC, that means we’re losing a lot of space and it doesn’t look as good as it could.
So I’m helping rework the platform with two full-time members. We’re optimizing our social channels so they connect to the platform in a natural way and are easier to access in the G123 platform itself. We’re also working on making sure that the payment systems are designed in a way that’s streamlined and easy to use.
My longer term plan is to redesign how we present all our games, from the existing library and to titles in the pre-registration phase. Even though I'm a part timer, I'm doing all these important jobs here. So I enjoy it very much!
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What surprised you about working at CTW?
There’s so much to do and learn! For the UI work, we work on Figma. I’ve been learning a lot about the various UI/UX rules because there’s really so many! I mean, I’m getting the hang of the design work but I’m still not there with all the many rules that I have to learn. There are really specific UI/UX rules for each operating system.
At CTW, I’m learning a lot more skills than I would in other companies. When I was a student in Shenzhen, I also worked at a game company. I mostly did the UI for their games, and the experience was quite different. We tended to focus on creating visual elements, making sure everything fit the screen in the most modern and natural way, stuff like that.
But the UI/UX for our service is a transformation into a newer system. There’s a lot of technical knowledge that you need to take into consideration since we have games in multiple languages. With that and becoming knowledgeable about the rules for each operating system, I’m definitely learning more here.
And the platform can go anywhere in the future. We're now working on the IP game platform. That’s our main business. But I’m excited by the fact that maybe there’ll be something more than games in a few years. Like, maybe we’ll get into publishing comics or something else? Then, we can make the platform bigger and bigger and cover more areas of entertainment. I’d love to be in charge of designing the UI/UX for that kind of service.
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For more information about our available positions, have a look below.?
We’re actively looking for talent in the following roles.