WEISHAN YU

Owned creative direction and design strategy for Effect House's asset and template ecosystem, the system external creators use to build TikTok effects. The job was not making better effects; it was making thousands of creators better at making them.

• Shipped AIGE (AI Generated Effects), an industry-first AI asset and content creation tool, as a new Effect House feature (Q3 2025): 15,000+ assets and effects created in the first two months. Designed the prompt-engineering layer that matches generations to thousands of assets in the Effect House library.
• Designed separate template strategies for novice and expert creators; templates generated 42,000+ effects, including Billie Tear (1.5M videos, 50M views), Angel vs Devil (1.2M videos, 22M views), and Make It Dance (1M videos, 17M views).
• Led a 15-person design team through post-restructuring transition as Acting Department Manager; realigned roles to product priorities and removed execution bottlenecks. Zero voluntary attrition; 2 designers promoted into management.
• Set the design strategy for the asset and template library, moving the team from one-off effect production to a creator ecosystem of assets, templates, education, and new capabilities.
• Extended the product mascot into a unified 2D/3D template language, cutting visual fragmentation across the library.

Led 3D design, innovation, and creative-technology work across TikTok Effects, Avatar, AR, and emerging capabilities. Better 3D assets alone would not have solved Avatar; what worked was a system where creative ideas, technology, and production scaled together.

• Built TikTok Avatar from 0 to 1: led 3D design direction and created the avatar system and production pipeline from scratch.
• Built the San Jose design team from scratch: hired 7 3D designers and 2 technical artists; no voluntary attrition over the team's lifetime.
• Co-developed an alpha-texture system with Engineering that cut rendering resource consumption by 50%+ while increasing customization variety.
• Fixed 3D import, shader, lighting, and version-control blockers by bringing game-production methods into a consumer app pipeline, working directly with Tools and Engineering.
• Designed proof-of-concepts across AR, AI, rendering, 3D, and interactive capabilities; rapid visual prototypes gave Product and Engineering tangible options for ambiguous technical decisions.
• Turned unreleased capabilities into visual demos backed by competitor and user-behavior research, so leadership could commit engineering effort to product bets earlier.

Grew from Lead Artist to Art Manager across a portfolio of live mobile games, owning visual direction and the art production machine behind it.

• Managed a 4-person art team plus external vendors; owned visual direction, art production, schedules, and resource planning for Brunch Crunch, Tiki Solitaire TriPeaks, Grand Casino, and Deal or No Deal.
• Produced 2D/3D characters, environments, and assets for live mobile games.
• Improved Unity-based 3D production workflows with Engineering, shortening asset-to-build turnaround.

Hands-on generalist years across mobile and web games, where the Maya-to-Unity habits I still use were formed.

• Created characters, environments, textures, animation, and interactive assets for Cordy, Cordy 2, Cordy Sky, Sleepy Jack, Tron, and Pixie Hollow (mobile and web).
• Helped establish Maya-to-Unity production workflows with Engineering; built reusable approaches for modeling, rigging, animation, and implementation.