MON AMI

Blog for Ami Y. Cai to document any visual development through process posts, answering questions, and any projects.

[yinwa]

Art Fight 2026 Personal Assets! Posting on tumblr so I have urls hehe

[yinwa]

2021 Holiday Card

Previous Card designs as inspiration

I had realized for 2019 and 2020, I had designed the illustrations based off of where I was for the holidays or where I lived. 2019's design is based on my dorm window at Pratt Institute. I would always look down and wave to people and write things on the window. For 2020, during COVID, my family and I went to spend the holidays at an Airbnb so the card was based on the image of a cottage or vacation home in the winter. In 2021, I moved into a new apartment and really loved my journey here.

Stamp carving mid-process

My design includes a couple references: my balcony/window, my IKEA fold-out chair (which I finally replaced with an ergonomic chair,) and my scallions!

[yinwa]

Logo for Cowberry Studios

WIP Post

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Yokai Garden Logo Process

INSPIRATION

Since for this project, I was already collecting the mood board for the illustration / branding aesthetic then I just needed to make a mood board for the font itself. So I tend to look at the gallery view of Google fonts to see how I like the title looks in both lower case and uppercase. Then once I have collected my favorites, I circle and highlight what elements of each of those examples I enjoy, keeping my focus on what I enjoy of them.

FREEHAND

Once I've made the highlighted elements of the fonts, I sketch out what is most comfortable and most appealing with the visual direction. Bits of inspiration of anime titles and gardening video game titles. The last bit that was edited was adding an eye on the pot of the potted plant.

[yinwa]

Jumbo Shrimpin’

⚓️ Gather a group of your otter friends to go out on a shrimping boat. The only limit is the time left in the day! 🦐

WIP Post

[yinwa]

Logo for “Modern Magicks: A Code Coven Conference”

Mood Board

A small moodboard of reference of the type of art direction to go. The left with having the official logo and colors. Then some inspirations on the right. I enjoyed the typography in the Modern Witch font but enjoyed the simplicity of the witchcraft and the elegance of the hands. 

Process

As much as I tried to include plant motifs in the logo like 2 of the references in the moodboard, it felt too busy. I needed something related to tech and something related to magic. When looking up “tech” motifs, it got really abstract and many successful logos for tech is never a logo of tech. So I tried to take the motif of “wires and connections” into instead like constellations. Which brought back in the moon found in the original Code Coven logo. The final sketch on the bottom right was the most successful of them and kept the concept clean. It gave me the inspiration of Koban (specifically koban engimonos) and sometimes english nickname: temple tokens.

Then when I was figuring out the colors for the logo itself, I was working with the official colors first, the pinks, purples, and a straight white. What I enjoyed more was taking Code Coven background gradient of pink and purple and making that the colors. 

When it comes to the type, I actually didn’t have many iterations with it. I went head first and started creating and fine-tuning it.

Variations

Placement variations. I think underneath is the most natural but wasn’t sure if I wanted the Modern Magicks on one line or not. I think the center iteration with the words on the left and right was interesting to attempt but I didn’t particularly like how separated Modern Magicks because it really split the concept. 

Final Color Outcome

The final result was a point thinner with a beautiful dull navy splash background.

The event was absolutely amazing with a great outcome of viewers and speakers. It was Code Coven’s first stream on their official twitch account:

/CODE_COVEN

Real excited to see how much more they’ll be doing! 

[yinwa333]

🧧 💞 🏳️‍🌈 💝 🐂 A tribute to my pink half

Keep reading

[yinwa]

Character Designs

Holly

A young soft hearted high schooler who tends to stay out of trouble.

Eve

A mysterious high schooler who tends to be on her own and somehow vanishes in the corner of your eye.

Eve had the most changes in her design, we had her sharp and tall, but then directed her shapes to be more playful and elusive.

[left to right Eve design: Ami C, Mon N, and Billie B]

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Logo Design Process

The vision of the logo was to have a whimsical serif type, that gives the retro but modern take of typography.

We then shortened the name to Hallow’s Eve due to the further research of Halloween’s origin name “All Hallow’s Eve.” We felt that since the original name had meant the night before All Saints’ Day, it felt far more cryptic and ominous rather than using Halloween.

So all that was left was adjusting!

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Hallow's Eve 

💌 A 2D platformer with painterly backgrounds and hand-drawn animation. The game is inspired by Over the Garden Wall and Night in the Woods. 🌙

​Story:

In the town of Hallow, there is a rumor about a girl named Eve who speaks to ghosts, lives in the forest, and vanishes at night. And you found a letter in your locker asking to meet, signed from Eve! Now you, Holly, will have to go to see if Eve is the elusive witch that everyone thinks she is.

[yinwa]

(LOVE)SICK! 

This is a sweet oc comic for my online riso class based on the words: GIRLS, CONDITION, SQUEAMISH, and NERVOUS. 

Also they’re a pair of characters that will be soon be featured on an upcoming game made with my friends Mon Nguyen-Vo and Billie Baxter called Hallow’s Eve!

[yinwa]

Who Let the Critters Out?!

🦇Who Let the Critters Out is a mini game where you play as a little bat named Peá, exploring the beach with all their friends!! They're asked to pass out watermelons for everyone but they have to find the slices first and avoid all the crabs on the way 🍉🦀

Extra Assets

A sweet 2 week passion project I made with my summer Code Coven class, Intro to Unity! It was really fun to not only do the art assets that I’m so used to but I figured out what makes this game tick. Figuring how these assets play a role within the space of this game and how to let both features work together.

[yinwa]

Redesigning My Logo

For the longest time ever my middle name has been one of my favorite aspects of my identity. It’s both my legal middle name and my Chinese name. My mom would tell me stories of the two Chinese characters of my middle name: Yin and Wa.

崟 Yin made up two smaller characters – 山 mountain and 王 king. So the character has two common depictions either as the king who lives under the mountain or the golden mountain. This is also a rarely used Chinese character. 娲 Wa is a reference to the Chinese mother goddess named 女娲 Nüwa. She is credited with creating humanity and repairing the Pillar of Heaven by melting 5 colored stones together and giving the sky color.

For a few years I decided that only Yin would be the representation of me and my work but after graduating I realized it wasn’t flexible and wasn’t doing what I needed the identity to really be. 

What I Needed From My Logo

I needed my logo to still represent my name. Almost taking the pictorial form of Chinese characters and modernizing it another step

I need this logo to be more flexible in line weight and size

I need this logo to be universally readable because my previous was not

I want it to be interchangeable in serious tones and fun positive tones

I then called up my good friend Ashna Kapadia (@kap.design) to direct me through different iterations. The sketches were roughly along the lines of having the mountain cap depict a crown as the mountain as well, nodding to both depictions of Yin. Then the rainbow above the mountain is my interpretation of Nüwa creating rainbows from adding colors to the sky.

What Does Having This Logo Mean For You?

I am heavily inspired by artists like OMOCAT who use their art and design skills to collaborate with many artists and create a wide variety of different outputs of work. I hope to work with many amazing individuals and representing values that matter to me.