Animation in marketing has become widely adopted by brands big and small, and for good reason. Animation is easily distributed in the current age of the internet, and can add an incredible amount of polish and excitement to your brand by visually bringing your logo or branding to life!
As more and more brands turn to animation, it’s important to highlight some of the work that goes on in traditional animation that shouldn’t be ignored when creating brand animations. For example, how does adding motion to your logo enhance or change your brand’s personality? And even more importantly, what is that personality?
Animating a logo isn’t as simple as just adding some cool motion to it – well, it can be that simple, but that will result in your animation seeming generic. You’ll also be jumping over a hugely important step in developing an animation if you don’t spend some time conceptualizing the character of your brand. Since we’re using the analogy of bringing your logo to life, you should ask yourself questions about what would happen if your logo did come to life. Think of the Pixar desk lamp that hops onto the screen and turns to look at the viewer. How would it walk? How would it stand, talk, dance or enter a room? Thinking about these kinds of human motions and expressions can start to inform how you feel about your logo’s personality, and can direct you or your animator in how to start to approach adding movement to your logo.
Your brand might be a cool, exciting character that is eye-catching and slick.
It might be a bouncy, goofy character that is completely over the top.
It could be a calm, subdued character that has a meditative quality to its motion.
Or, like how we think of Muse, it could be a happy, playful character that isn’t too up-tight and likes to go for a spin!
Notice how all these different types of motion, applied to the same logo, completely change the feeling of the perceived character or spirit that inhabits its movement. Even though your logo isn’t literally dancing, walking or giving a valedictorian speech, there’s a tangible energy to how it moves that lets us know so much more about it and your brand as a whole – including (but not limited to) the fact that you have some really cool animation!
