The Process
I started by designing a new character based on Duolingo’s official guidelines. The concept was an Italian chef created specifically for the Italian course, who would evaluate both language exercises and food-related cultural knowledge. I wanted him to feel slightly grumpy while still celebrating the user’s successful answers. Because the goal was to use Rive throughout the design process, I created the character directly in Rive rather than in Illustrator. Once the design was ready, I built a complete bone rig, adding extra arm bones for greater flexibility and IK controls for the legs to simplify animation. I also created joysticks for 2.5D head movement and controls for the eyes and eyelids. Finally, I developed a state machine with four animations: success, failure, and two idle states.
In the second phase, I adapted the Duolingo style to design a quiz interface. I created and animated three buttons and a progress bar, building each as a reusable component. I also designed a template component containing text areas for questions and answers. This template was used across the main artboard, where I swapped in content for each new question using data binding.
