Simon Knowles
· Dynamic Identity
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Most brands rebuild their motion from scratch for every launch, and pretty soon it drifts. A dynamic identity sets the rules once and writes them down as motion guidelines your teams can run without me.
Brands with an in-house team or an agency who will make the assets, and need the rules to make them to.
More than one team makes your motion.
In-house, an agency, a freelancer. Each one decides how things move, so each one decides differently.
You launch often.
Every launch starts from a blank timeline, and the brand looks a little different each time.
Your guidelines stop at the still image.
Logo, colour and type are written down. How they move is not.
A dynamic identity is every decision about how your brand moves, made once and written down: how fast, in what order, with what character, and what is never allowed to change.
You may know it as motion guidelines or a motion identity. I call it a dynamic identity because the document is only the record. The identity is the set of decisions behind it, and whether people can follow them.
What's in it ↓One document, with worked examples.
Principles.
Three or four words for how your brand moves, each turned into behaviour you can see and measure.
Motion language.
Timing, easing, order and distance, given as numbers so two people get the same result.
What can vary, and what can't.
The rules that hold across every format, channel and sub-brand, and the places where teams are free to choose.
The mark.
How your logo arrives on screen, and where that animation may and may not be used.
Worked examples.
The rules applied to your real touchpoints, so nobody has to interpret them.
Governance.
Who signs motion off, how the system is updated, and what to do when a case isn't covered.
Every system includes a full Motion Audit. I find out how your brand moves today before I write a rule for how it should.
Then the system is designed against the same four principles the audit measures: Timeless, Precise, Functional and Realism.
Add the toolkit ↓A system tells your teams how the brand moves. A motion toolkit gives them the files to do it: templates, presets and component animations, built to the system and handed over to your team or agency.
It is for brands that launch campaigns regularly and find that rebuilding motion every time is costing them.
I build toolkits mostly in vector, so they scale to any screen and stay usable for years.
Where this comes from ↓Twelve years designing masters and global formats for Netflix, Paramount and Amazon title launches taught me what a dynamic identity has to do. It has to hold together across hundreds of versions, in every territory, against a launch date that does not move.
I do the work myself, from the audit to the handover.
Questions ↓Nearly. Motion guidelines are the document. The system is the decisions in it, and how they are governed. You get both.
No. It is the chapter most of them are missing, and it is written to sit alongside what you have.
Your in-house team or your agency, working to the system. If you want ready-made files as well, add the toolkit.
It is included. The system is built on what the audit finds.