Enhance your brand with a motion design style guide

There is no doubt about it. Motion design isn’t just a nice-to-have “icing on your brand” anymore. Today it belongs to the basics of a decent visual identity. Nevertheless a lot of brands still don’t make use of the benefits that motion design has to offer. 

But how do you start? Well, the first step is to develop a motion design style guide. With this document, you can maintain focus and consistency throughout your animation video productions.

In this article, you’ll learn why and how to implement motion design in your visual identity.

Why would you incorporate video animation in your visual identity?

Animation is a powerful tool to communicate about ideas and values with your followers and/or target audience. In just a few seconds your message will leave an impression. Next to that your animated video is super shareable on about every platform. As an added bonus, your multilingual follower base can be easily reached by adding subtitles or additional language versions.

How can you add animation to your brand?

Each organization has different purposes and goals that need different types of animation. An NGO for example, wants to make its voice heard, loud and clear. They can do this through cheeky, snappy and memorable animations. But a European lobby organization who wants to convince EU legislators, might need a more serious and stylized animated look & feel and tone-of-voice.

What has animation to offer for your brand? Which concepts might be interesting for your story? That’s where the motion design style guide comes in. This guide is the result of research on how your brand can effectively use motion design and animation. It is a collection of specific motion design directions and unique, custom made animations created for your brand.

A motion design style guide is an audiovisual extension to your existing branding guidelines.

Rozan Cools, Art Director at Zologie

Based on the goals and values of your brand your motion design style guide usually includes:

  • An animated logo
  • Animated social media content guidelines
  • A corporate live-video style (lower thirds etc.)
  • A library of illustration assets which can be used in future animations
  • Any other interesting audiovisual additions for your brand based on the research

When we offer the motion design style guide as a service, we deliver all of the assets in a PDF handbook packed with hands-on guidelines on how to correctly implement those animations in your organization’s communication plan. The idea is that any studio can work with the guidelines, but we’re happy to work out social media animations for your brand too. 😇

How to effectively use the motion design style guide?

Develop animated social media content with the concepts detailed in the guide

Social media is an existential part of marketing and animated video is of great value to your social media content calendar. Based on the motion design style guide, you can work out a bite-sized concepts and vignettes for your content calendar. The so called snackables. The main goal of these videos are to boost visibility on social media and engage with your followers in a more unique way. 

Read more about our view on social media animations here.

Professionalize your live video content

Regularly posting a video message to your social media pages is an easy and personal way of connecting with your followers. Add a corporate video style and these videos will look way more professional

  • Attract the viewer’s attention with an animated title
  • Introduce your speaker and his organization with lower-thirds
  • Emphasize the speaker’s words through keywords. 
  • End the video with a smooth transition and a logo animation

To conclude, motion design and animation are great tools to improve your brand, boost visibility and create the right atmosphere. Let us know if you are considering to professionalize your brand with animation. We’re happy to have a short chat about it through Google Meet. Contact us via the contact page, mail us (hello@zologie.com) or call us: +32485401523.