ANIREVO GUIDE

Incorporating Anime Revolution’s visual identity into their schedule-keeping app

Boasting an annual visitor count of over 30,000, Anirevo Guide provides convention attendees with a way for them to navigate the hustle and bustle of an anime convention with confidence.

As the sole designer on the team, I helped Vancouver’s biggest local anime convention, Anime Revolution, increase the usage on their app that highlights the rich selection of panels that occur during their 3-day event. They already had a app that was shipped for both Android and iOS; however, their downloads were sitting at 500 per year, despite boasting 30,000 attendees per year during their summer event.

THE PROCESS

Research

I've been a volunteer with Anirevo since 2018, but I'm usually a language interpretation officer for our Japanese industry guests - this meant that since I'm usually scrounging around behind-the-scenes, I actually have no idea what Anime Revolution attendees are doing before, during, and after an anime convention. In order to identify primary behaviours and motivations of convention attendees, I started my design process by: hosting casual chats with past attendees of the con, surveilling the community discord, and having chats with long-time staff members in more customer-facing roles.

Research findings

1. Attendees are looking for community
They often decide which panels to go to, which artists to visit based on where their friends are going.

2. Planning is just as exciting as showing up
Hard-core attendees are using the app weeks, even months out before the convention to figure out what their day will look like during con weekend.

3. “[Insert your favourite artist here] is going? Okay, count me in!”
Many attendees are motivated to buy tickets once find artists, industry guests, & exhibitors of interest who will be at Anirevo.

Iteration

ALIGNING THE VISUAL SYSTEM

The easiest task for me to tackle was creating a design system for the app that would align with the rest of the Anirevo brand - This meant updating the app to use its brand fonts, as well as updating its colour systems.

Prototyping

Since there were a lot of micro-interactions that I wanted to demonstrate to developers, I experimented with using Claude to creative interactive versions of my Figma frames. Although this workflow has its flaws, it really helps developers see designs in context and allows them to explore user flows in a non-linear way.

Shipping & Iterating

As I approach year 2 of working on the Anirevo app, I'm working on expanding the volume of information available on the app as well as including Anirevo staff as users.

We're working on a few micro-features as well, based some positive feedback we got! Look out for an update on the app as Anirevo Vancouver 2026 comes to town this August.

Actual feedback from the Anirevo Official Discord. :)

Download the app!