Animations at Pace
Creating engaging social posts with minimal design time.
Remit Training is a company that has 4 major business divisions, plus one company division and employing over 250 people. As part of a fast and agile Marketing team. We aim to push out 10 posts a day - nearly all designed from scratch - covering these five areas, and covering 5 entirely different messages. About 90% of this is static material.
Upon recognising that the hierarchy of measurable engagement within social media closely correlates with the amount of movement within a post (from most to least engaging, it typically goes interactive, video, animation, poll, photograph, graphic, text), I began to produce more animations as a matter of improving engagement.
Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that animations can take a lot of time, with the results not always working out. Because of the time taken, the stakes are too high and it takes too long to produce material that can be reviewed (we would use storyboards but when time is of the essence, you often are forced to wing-it). This demoralises designers who work on material requiring extensive changes and leads to confusion and more animations where there's simply no point to their existence (see below).
A classic example of 'nice idea in theory'. This animation took 8 hours to produce and was scrapped due to a lack of direction and clear purpose.
I needed to cut the time taken to produce quick animations.
In summary, I needed to find a way to increase social media engagement, and the best way to do this was by making things move. Making things move typically takes a lot of time, so how could I reduce this?
The first step was to identify the essence of our static-graphic posts. In a nutshell, these are posts involving photo, form, colour and text. To know how to create collateral quickly, I would need to start with these basics.
I began by storyboarding and creating a simple animation that would allow material to be replaced easily. After Effects was available and I got to work developing animations in the smallest possible social format - a square - to allow any templates to be expanded upon later without rearranging content.
Once the initial compositions were completed, it was time to assess the ease of swapping elements in and out.
So how was it? Whilst text was easy enough and form was simple, images needed re-keying each time they were replaced to allow the focus of any images to remain in-frame. This makes sense. Text is normally well within the frame and forms typically aren't the focus. Photos often are the focus and often run off-page.
To resolve this, I used shapes like you might image frames in InDesign. Key the shape movement, then parent the image to the shape so the two move as one. Now images merely need replacing, scaling, and positioning once. Fine tuning keyframes is no longer required.
As a result, animations in this design can be executed in as little as thirty minutes when all assets and copy are specified and ready, drastically decreasing animation production time.
