Why You Should Add Motion Design to Your Creative Skillset

Why You Should Add Motion Design to Your Creative Skillset_

Over the last few years and months, the shift towards motion design is becoming more and more noticeable. It is impossible to avoid, whether you’re scrolling through social media or viewing digital billboards.

In a generation where TikTok has disrupted the social media platform arena, it’s more important than ever to make sure that your digital offering is matched with the industry. In this blog our Designer, Jade explains why now more than ever it’s important to have motion design skills.

The direction of social platforms

TikTok which only started in 2017 has over 1 billion users in over 150 countries and is only going to grow moving forward. Instagram was quite late to focus on video content, however, earlier this year the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, announced that the platform would be putting more focus on video. This means that the Instagram algorithm will favour video content.

Why have motion design skills?

As digital platforms shift towards a focus on video content we as designers should be looking to improve and expand our motion skills to compete in the ever-changing market. Skillsets change over time and are influenced by what we enjoy and what is in demand. Previously motion design was seen as a ‘nice to have’ but in light of the recent shift, brands are having to incorporate more video content to stay ahead. We’re increasingly developing more and more motion design and video content for our clients.

Brands are realising the importance of motion design and how it can affect the way users interact with their brand. The user experience must be always considered when creating anything. By adding motion content it allows for an enhanced user experience, which allows you to form strong emotional connections with your audience. Motion design can help bring a project together whilst allowing a brand to express their personality and therefore build on brand awareness, trust and credibility.

Motion allows you to tell a story and create an identity through movement. Just like how there’s a difference in how people walk, talk and so on, you can create a brand identity and tone of voice in the type of motion used. Brands now need to consider motion in terms of tone of voice in their guidelines, this guidance and rationale will allow for brands to bring through their personality. In fact, the element of motion design may make brands expand on their tone of voice or encourage them to develop it further to allow for more expression.

Where to start?

You’ve decided to start learning motion design, which is great but it can be hard to know where to begin when there are so many tutorials out there. From personal experience of learning animation, the best way to start is with a passion project or a project that doesn’t have any tight deadlines. These types of projects are great as there isn’t time pressure and you can explore freely.

Instead of making a list of skills and techniques you want to learn, it is more useful to be actively working on something. I find that I learn more when working on a project, as I search for relevant animation styles and transitions but often find these can be used on future projects.

Another way of learning is to enrol on a course. Recently I enrolled on Ben Marriott’s course, ‘Master Motion Design’, which goes through the 12 principles of animation whilst giving you creative projects to work through. You’re learning whilst working on engaging projects. It is important to understand the 12 principles of animation. For example, adding some anticipation to a project can affect the tone and suspense of the piece.

The 12 principles of animation are:

  • Squash & stretch
  • Anticipation
  • Staging
  • Straight ahead & pose to pose
  • Follow through & overlapping action
  • Slow in, slow out
  • Arcs
  • Secondary action
  • Timing
  • Exaggeration
  • Solid drawing
  • Appeal

Now is always the right time to learn about motion design and try to include it in your work. Even if you don’t think it applies to current client work now, it may be useful in the future or may even give you the means to win new work. Today’s audience is wanting to digest more video and by not creating video content you are potentially missing out on a market. By learning just the basics, it can open the doors to so many more opportunities.

Here at Punch, we have rolled out video content for ForHousingSSG InsightBike & Boot and more. Demands and trends are constantly changing so at Punch we’re always looking ahead to ensure we’re creating the best and most effective content for our clients.

Follow us on Instagram to see examples of our motion design and video content.