Motion graphics: design in motion, and where it helps more than it decorates

The terms blur, but the practical distinction is useful.

Animation, in the traditional sense, tells a story with characters who act. It has a script, an arc and performance.

Motion graphics animates graphic elements: a number counting up, a bar growing, text entering, an icon morphing into another. There is no character and no narrative of its own; it serves a piece of information.

In social content, almost everything people call animation is motion graphics. That is good news, because motion graphics is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster to produce.

There are four uses with a clear function, and it is worth staying inside them:

• Adding movement where there is none. In faceless content and in explanations over static images, it is what keeps retention from collapsing.
• Highlighting the right information. A word appearing at the moment it is spoken sticks far more than the same word permanently on screen.
• Showing the invisible. Processes, flows, comparisons and number changes do not exist in filmed footage and do exist in an animated chart.
• Marking identity. A signature transition repeated across pieces builds feed recognition.

The classic mistake is confusing movement with quality. Symptoms:

• Everything moves all the time. When every element is animated, nothing stands out and the eye does not know where to look.
• A transition longer than the information. Two seconds of effect to display one word is time taken from the content.
• Movement that means nothing. If the animation does not indicate order, emphasis or relationship, it only costs attention.
• An animated intro. A brand sting at the start is the most efficient way of losing the three seconds that decide everything.

The ruler is simple: every movement has to answer why it exists. If the answer is "it looks nice", cut it.

For anyone publishing often, production cost is the deciding factor. Three decisions solve it:

• A small set of reusable animations. Three or four standard text entrances, always the same. Repetition is identity, not laziness.
• Automatic captions before anything else. It is the highest return motion graphics there is, and editors now generate it on their own.
• Templates instead of new builds. Building a project from scratch per video is the fastest route to stopping publishing altogether.

• Every animation answers why it exists.
• I do not put an animated intro at the start.
• I use on screen captions in every spoken video.
• I have a small set of reusable animations.
• The movement highlights the information rather than competing with it.