Breathing life into brands

Advances in technology have opened a world of possibilities for how brands show up in the digital world. With that, people expect more from brands in how we want to interact with them. Lisa Battles explores these possibilities, talking with teams who are doing some of the most innovative digital brand work worldwide.

Some say we interpret as much as 70% of the world through non-verbal cues. While many nonverbals are static – singular facial expressions, postures and appearances – most are dynamic, working together to deliver an overall impression. 

So, do you know your brand’s body language? And what does a well-executed, immersive branded user experience even look like? 

“It doesn’t look like any one thing, but more so feels like a place of one’s own, and the elements that make up the identity are responsive to the states of the experience rather than a dogmatic casing for it,” says Wolff Olins creative director Jess Yan, whose team recently developed a dynamic new visual identity for Patreon, a subscription-based platform that connects content creators with their fans, in late 2023.

Yan’s statement is evident in the work for Patreon, done while the company revamped its entire platform to better connect with its user groups. The Wolff Olins team helped them create a new brand to capture this transformation from a membership company to a ‘creator company.’ The focus on creators drove the process, resulting in an identity they say is intentionally “unstable, unfinished – as DIY as their creators, and as WIP as the process of creativity itself.”

The dynamic logo resembles a ‘P’ while retaining an amorphous, fluid-like shape to suggest it’s a container that can hold and support unlimited, creative versioning. The team brought in 3D artist David McLeod to bring the logo to life and Dinamo Type Foundry for a wordmark that transitions. It can be thin and subtle to allow space for creators’ voices or heavier when representing the Patreon voice. On the product side, developers redesigned the app experience.

You just feel it

A well-executed branded design should resonate with people intuitively, says the team at Base Design, whose Geneva team recently collaborated on a new brand concept for the US architecture firm Hanbury, ‘Delivering ideas with stretch.’

Far beyond the verbals, the new website and design elements encapsulate the firm’s dramatic growth over a decade, its expansion from primarily higher education projects into many other spaces and, most of all, its emphasis on positioning its unique process and personality as its value proposition. You feel that flexibility in design that stretches—an extensible logo, bespoke typeface and immersive UX.

“It should be something you feel—almost intuitive —not something you need to understand, notice or read. It all comes down to the essence of being human: the quality of the interaction and the impact it has on you,” says the Base Design team.

While it was a logical choice for the Hanbury message, motion graphics aren’t always the answer for immersive brand design, they say. 

“Motion graphics are not a necessity or a cure-all; what truly matters is effectively conveying your concept, story and attitude,” according to Base. “Sometimes, staying still or quiet can have a much greater impact.”

Image credits: Base Design and Hanbury

To move or not to move

Nevertheless, motion design remains at the heart of digital experiences, even if only in the decision about what you do with it. It’s a foundational component that underpins a digital brand presence and defines its “behaviours” in the same way a powerful person strides across the room with confidence or a timid person tiptoes.

In the case of the social media app Instagram in early 2024, the brand focused almost entirely on motion concepts to refresh and expand its identity. Recognising how motion plays such an important role in the way its product is marketed and experienced by creators and users, the company brought in The Netherlands’ Studio Dumbar/DEPT® to work with its in-house teams to develop a motion system for its existing brand identity, created by 2x4, and typeface by Colophon. 

Studio Dumbar lead designer and partner Stan Haanappel says the ability to humanise a brand is inherent to motion design and why it can have such a tremendous impact.

“With Instagram, we investigated a lot: How should it move? Very slick? Should everything in marketing move very clumsy, very fast or energetic? By looking back at their strategy and also at the product itself, the people who are actually using the product are the people making the movements. The user who is interacting with the interfaces— that is never perfect. If you drag something in a story, draw something or type something, the typing is not like what is exactly there. You always make mistakes. You erase something, you come back and you type something else,” Haanappel says. 

“That was one of the core characteristics that we tried to incorporate in the motion system, that it feels like someone is playing around with it and someone is moving things around. The motions aren’t super slick, but it feels human. That was the whole goal of this motion system.”

Image credit: Studio Dumbar/DEPT

The team then developed motion techniques—similar to gestures in the app like clicking, swiping, placement, lens movement when shifting perspective—and the motion physics to complete the guidelines and toolkit designers can work with to execute the system. Also, they had to consider both the product side and the marketing side.

“The goal of our motion system was to create something that was applicable for both. So, it can be used in the product, in how transitions are moving or how elements behave, for example. And it’s the same for marketing, where there is a social post or [digital] billboard or campaign, how the things move should be connected. I think that’s the strength of this project,” Haanappel says. 

Yan says the Wolff Olins team had to take similar considerations into account for the Patreon project, adding “The decision to dramatically revamp both the brand and product experience was pretty bold and unprecedented. Both were in development simultaneously with fairly limited times, and so close partnership was the only way to successfully pull that off.”

What they produced achieved three goals, she says: Creating a “shared centre” or point-of-view between the product and brand teams, encouraging the teams to “play together” as the brand expression grew; and creating a variable, fluid range of tools that Patreon can use to scale the expression systematically—responsive to both large- and small-scale applications.

Balancing challenges and teams

All of our experts point to the greatest challenge when branding for the digital world being striking the perfect balance between innovation and the sustainability of tools and assets.

“How do you create something that is recognisable and still has the opportunity to be flexible? Where can you find the balance? Can you create the right tool set, the right guidelines, so that in the future, other teams can take this motion system or brand and create something that is unique for that campaign and that moment in time yet still has certain elements that tie the brand together?” Haanappel says. 

Not only is that challenge ever-present, but so too is the risk of playing it too safe, says the Base Design team.

“Challenge this by embracing the possibilities that lie within risk. Avoid looking at competitors at all costs and mimicking existing solutions. Have the courage to embrace new ways of doing things,” they say. “It’s crucial to carefully consider how you compose your project team. Empower the team by bringing together top talent and encouraging them to work as a cohesive unit.”

And it “takes a village of experts,” says Yan, elaborating that means across fields, from generalists to specialists. “On a project like Patreon, the brand team alone consisted of strategists, designers, type designers, motion designers, 3D artists, account managers and writers, while the Patreon in-house team brought its full product and marketing teams’ rigor to execute.”

Digital brand design demands unprecedented levels of collaboration, so building a team with a shared mindset and passion for what they do is critical, Haanappel says.

“There is also a certain eagerness. Everyone wants to work, wants to do good work and is always searching for the best answer and always challenging themselves. It’s not one technical or sort of kind of motion designer [but more that] everyone shares the same passion whether you are a creative coder or visual designer,” he says, adding that setting aside dedicated time and space for non-client-based experimentation and innovation helps keep their team creative and inspired, even if it’s one day every four weeks.

Minds in motion

Collaboration, experimentation and inspiration extend far outside the studio for Studio Dumbar/DEPT®, which emerged as a global leader in motion design in 2019 by staging the world’s first motion design festival, Demo. It started with an experimental project designing screensavers for the company that owns the OOH advertising screens in the Netherlands—replacing downtime once held by images of penguins with dynamic typography spelling city names. 

Seeing the positive response from that project, creative director Liza Enebeis saw the opportunity to showcase the work of other designers in the same public spaces. For the first festival, they took over all 84 screens in Amsterdam Central Station, welcoming over 250,000 visitors to see curated work selected among over 2,700 submissions from 904 designers representing 70 countries. The 2022 event took over 5,000 screens in public spaces, showcasing 800 motion works over 2024 hours. The 2025 Demo Festival is set for January 30 in the Netherlands with a special selection also shown in select cities within Belgium, Germany, the UK, Spain, Italy and Canada. 

“It was a really great success because all of these designers submitted their work, and there was a curation and selection for exhibition. Then designers travelled to the Netherlands to look at the work. It was a gathering of motion designers and showed there are so many like-minded people who are in graphic design, motion and animation, celebrating something that hadn’t been celebrated,” Haanappel says. “From our perspective, it also was a learning curve. You see all the different styles from people all over the world. It is so great to see this and it helps us, as well, to be inspired.” 

This article was taken from Transform magazine Q3, 2024. You can subscribe to the print edition here.