Its the Old Bay on your crabs. The chocolate on your Berger cookies. Animated logo opens are the topper to your wedding cake. It completes your video production and wraps your brand around the amazing content your audience will enjoy. A well executed animation will capture the fun or sophistication of your company. It sets the stage and creates brand awareness within the first few seconds of any video. For businesses who are considering creating a video, a logo animation needs to be part of the package. It’s this little attention to detail your audience will recognize and appreciate. When working with animators there are a few key guidelines to remember.
Keep it short.
How often do you watch a video until its very last frame? Ever start to glance at the recommended videos seconds after you hit play? As attention spans continue to shrink, getting to the core message of your video is your fist priority. The role of the logo is branding. With each video you produce your logo will be the first thing they see. Keeping your logo animation to :05 will establish your brand and enable you to get to the core message that is within the video. Keeping it short will engage the viewer from the first frame and quickly get to the heart of your message that is contained in the video that follows.
Keep it simple.
Sometimes less is more. An animator can spend hours with just a logo. Keeping the animation design simple by applying 2D effects will keep the overall look clean and professional and help keep the costs for the production well within budget. Hours spent creating complex long opening animations does not guarantee quality and can only increase costs.
Here are a few simple 2D techniques animators will use to make your logo move.
- Upon receiving your logo the animator will identify the individual elements that make up a logo. Logos usually contain characters, icons, shapes and text.
- An animator could separate these elements and create interesting transitions on screen. It is the transitions on screen that will separate the good animations from the bad. Varying the speed and creating interesting ways to bring these elements together is the key to a well executed animation.
- When designing the animator will look for elements that trigger movements. Some are obvious. My favorite example of this is the execution of the Charm City Fitness logo. The running character was an easy way to add movement to the design that supported what they do as a company.
Adding movement to the Charm City Fitness logo.
Some designs are simple so adding elements to support the logo is another option. In this example YET, a data company, needed and open but their logo design had very simple lines and text. To identify what they do we incorporated simple data graphic icons before the reveal of their final logo.
Know the brand.
Are you fun or fancy, maybe flashy or sophisticated. Knowing what the company does or who they are is also an important part of logo animation. The answer to these questions set the tone for the execution. This will dictate tone and speed of the animation. Making a fun open for a company that is more polished will only hurt their branding. An animator’s job before jumping into design is to ask some very important questions to discover what the company is about and the feeling they would like captured in an opening animation.
Don’t ignore the style guide.
Some companies are very specific of what you can and can’t do with their logo. Many do not want you to break up the elements and will only let you display their logo as originally created. A good way to approach this is to offer a customized open. Incorporating elements of their company such as photos or supporting graphics to create a branded open that leads to the reveal of the logo. We had the opportunity to create customized opens for Pandora. Product placement incorporated into the design helped support their overall message for the video as well as creating a fun and engaging content for the open.
Having an opening animated logo will only help the branding of your company. Continued use throughout your campaign will only hammer home your branding and tie it to the amazing content that will follow.
