9 Squares

This project is inspired by the original 9 Squares initiative organized by Skip Dolphin Hursh, David Stanfield, and Al Boardman, where designers were given a small square, four colors, and three seconds to create anything they liked. My version takes that spirit of playful constraint and channels it into a cohesive narrative built around the joy (and chaos) of baking. Like the original collaborative project, this version embraces creative constraint: every square must follow its assigned color palette, even when that leads to surreal cake colors or unexpected pastry aesthetics. The challenge is to make each animation visually appealing while staying true to its principle and its palette.

Across the grid, the squares work together to form a unified visual recipe — from cracking eggs to frosting the final cake — showing how timing, arcs, anticipation, exaggeration, and more can transform simple baking actions into expressive motion design.