While the term ‘motion graphics’ is new, it has become an essential part of design in recent years.

Motion graphics are animations combined with audio. Usually designers make them using a computer. In other words, they are not films that get shot using actors or locations in real life. “Audiences generally watch motion graphics are on the internet,” said Frazer King from motion graphics firm Votion.

Recently, animation has boomed. The reason is the global Covid19 pandemic. During the pandemic, live-action productions have faced delays due to the coronavirus. Animators have faced no such problems. It is easy to make an animation in a computer without leaving your home.

With motion graphics there is no need for actors to meet or crews to assemble. Everything can be done online.  As well as being Covid-safe, motion graphics are much cheaper than using real live actors and locations.

That has created a new interest in animation in Hollywood and beyond.

Covid has also seen a corresponding boom in viewership. Video streaming has been especially popular. The boom saw new U.S. video subscribers rise to 12.9% of households during in 2020.

Since then the rate has levelled off. It is currently at 3.9%.

Video continues to dominate the internet. The numbers can be staggering.

Over 500 million people watch Facebook videos every day. YouTubers upload 300 hours of video content to the platform every minute. 93% of businesses gain new customers as a result of video content.

People spend an average of 6 hours and 48 minutes per week watching online videos. That is why advertisers use motion graphics for campaigns. And it is also why designers use motion graphics to make content or full length movies.

With so many potential uses for this industry-changing technology, what will come next?

In 2021, we’ve seen a shift towards three emerging styles. Those styles are minimalist design, textured animation and 3D animation.

This blog post explores each style of motion graphics. It gives inspirational examples and discusses what might be the future of animation.

New technology and changes in how we consume video have driven these new styles.

Minimalist Design

Minimalist design focuses on simplicity and intuitiveness. It does not rely on flashy effects or a large quantity of content.

This style has become popular due to plenty of free resources online. They allow you to build your own animation fast.

These styles have become especially popular in social media marketing. The fast-paced nature of content production means they can be responsive to trends. With minimalist design there is no need to scout locations, fly in actors or even check the weather. All the production work occurs inside a computer.

Existing software can make the process even faster. Animations created in just one day can get large audiences.

Brands must stand out from competitors and styles such as minimalism can help. Minimal design often has a good deal of impact. That is vital if you want to catch viewer’s attention.

The styles below show how brands can use this approach to captivate their audience.

Specimen, is a colour matching game for iOS. It is an app whose design is as simple as it is effective.

The Illusion of Life presents 12 universal principles for animation. Instead of using characters it uses cubes.

Minimalistic animation by Nicolas Menard uses crayons instead of complex graphics.. Music gives the visuals character and life.

Bran Dougherty-Johnson’s showreel from 2015 takes simple graphic vectors to new levels.

Textured animation

Textures in motion graphics appear natural and organic. They seem more tactile than traditional styles due to the way they interact with light.

The styles tend to contain more atmosphere. They create an illusion of depth or movement that mimic real-world. Take a look at the styles below that explore this technique.

Sofia El Khyari’s animated short Le Corps Poreux makes tactile use of watercolours. It tells a metaphysical story about a young woman who heads to the sea to re-discover herself.

Sofia El Khyari | Le Corps Poreux

Tuscany is a hand-drawn animation painted in Photoshop, five seconds at a time. Creator Coleern Bairk completed it over the course of 15 months.

The animation is inspired by a night spent in a cement annex on an isolated Tuscan farm. It explores fear, paralysis, and rebirth, he says.

Coleen Baik | Tuscany

Pink is Giant Ant’s addition to CNN’s Colorscope series. It features a soothing, delicate texture.

According to creator Eric Pautz each scene washing over the previous one is calming. He animated the objects a little slower than reality. That means they appear larger-than-life.

“That helped with the dream-like vibe we were going for,” said Pautz.

3D motion graphics

3D graphics are particularly popular on Instagram. Great examples abound.

“Unbreakable” explains what it feels like to suffer from nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM). The film stars Barbara the Bunny, a plush toy built in a magical factory. As she comes alive, she coughs, splitting a piece of her fabric. “Quality Control” throws Barbara out of the factory.

Barbara the Bunny then heads off on a quest to find a specialist doctor who can help her. To Barbara’s relief, a sweet toy repair shop owner comes to her rescue.

The creators use rich, poetic visuals to engage the viewer with the concerns of NTM sufferers.

An ad for high yield bond funds uses 3D motion graphics to create marbles. We see them roll over a landscape. It feels completely reel.

Playdead | High Yield Bond Fund

This showreel from Fugu makes affecting use of abstract 3d textures and a voice over of pure doom.

Fugu | Instinct

Bugged used 3D animation software to turn clay into life-like computer animations.

Celebrating the 2020 Winners | Bugged

The future of animation

There is a need to animate for specific devices such as Virtual Reality headsets. Headsets such as Oculus and Hololens open up new creative opportunities. Brands and designers can take advantage.

VR means designing animated experiences in an immersive digital environment.

Psyop have launched a wholly-owned VR experience called Kismet.

Kimset takes Tarot card reading sets it in Virtual Reality. The game features a deck of 22 hand-painted Tarot cards and an accurate real-time map of the solar system.

Kismet offers unique outcomes every calendar day, tied to the cards that you choose. Your birth date and the real alignment of the stars at the time of your reading also effect the reading.

Psyop jumps in the VR game with “Kismet”

As we see, there are many styles of motion graphics you can use. Each offers a different advantage. But when it comes to success, the future of motion graphics is foretold.

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About the author

My name is Andy Pemberton. I am an expert in data visualization. I guide global clients such as Lombard Odier, the European Commission and Cisco on the best way to use data visualization and then produce it for them: reports, infographics and motion graphics. If you need your data visualized contact me at andy@furthr.co.uk or call 07963 020 103

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As we pull out of lockdown and the pandemic subsides, some economists have started to turn their attention to a new risk – inflation.

With lockdown over, pent up demand has been released but suppliers have been caught on the hop. The result is more demand than supply, rising prices and a bulge in inflation.

The annual UK inflation rate more than doubled in April. What manufacturers pay for raw materials has risen 9.9%.

Recently the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported much higher inflation than almost anyone predicted.

With spiralling inflation comes rising interest rates. So will the Bank of England raise interest rates to cool an overheating economy? No

One reason is that today’s inflation rates are just a blip reflecting what are probably one-time rises in the prices of building materials and used cars.

Once the pandemic subsides, we will likely again find ourselves in an environment of sustained low interest rates as a result of low investment demand. And the reason for that is plunging fertility.

Last month’s census report showed the lowest U.S. population growth since the 1930s.

• Japan’s working-age population has been declining since the mid-1990s.
• The euro area has been on the downslope since 2009.
• Even China is starting to look like Japan, a legacy of its one-child policy.

We are in a flat population economy. Under normal circumstances investment demand is driven by population growth, as new families need newly built houses, new workers require the construction of new factories, and so on.

Secular stagnation

But low population growth can cause persistent weakness in spending. This phenomenon is called “secular stagnation.”

The downside of persistent low interest rates for the economy is that if there is a recession, the Bank of England is not in a position to slash rates to stimulate growth as rates are so low already.

One way out is for governments to take advantage of those same low interest rates to borrow money to fund public works and rebuild crumbling infrastucture, stimulate the economy and encourage investment.

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About the author

My name is Andy Pemberton. I am an expert in data visualization. I guide global clients such as Lombard Odier, the European Commission and Cisco on the best way to use data visualization and then produce it for them: reports, infographics and motion graphics. If you need your data visualized contact me at andy@furthr.co.uk or call 07963 020 103

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It sounds insane but Nick Clegg, the onetime deputy prime minister of the UK, now head of Facebook’s public affairs, appears to hold the future of US democracy in is hands.

As you will recall, Facebook’s advisory board just upheld the decision to suspend Donald Trump from Facebook, following the attacks from a mob of Trump supporters on the Capitol building on January 6 this year.

Already banned from Twitter, the decision to suspend Donald Trump from Facebook was not trivial.  Without Facebook and Twitter, Donald Trump’s ability to build support for his on-gong campaign to overturn the legal 2020 US election is significantly weakened.

According to Brad Parscale, the Trump campaign manager in 2020 and digital director in 2016,  “Facebook was the highway which his car drove on.” The power of Mr. Trump’s pronouncements on social media had been their ability to ricochet quickly across the web and into the streams of his supporters — something far harder to achieve while being de-platformed.

Without Facebook and Twitter Trump will also find it much harder to raise money and wield influence over the Republican party. He won’t have access to Facebook to help the candidates he wants to support in the primaries in 2022.

Put more simply, Donald Trump’s ongoing attempt to overturn the 2020 election, undermine and ultimately destroy US democracy will be impeded by this decision.

But there is a twist in the tale. In the 12,000 word judgement it issued, the  London-based oversight board said Facebook could not ban Trump indefinitely – it must find a permanent solution on its own, effectively kicking a final decision back to Facebook’s executives about whether to ban Trump for life or let him back on the platform in the future.

The person who Facebook said would lead that decision-making process? Nick Clegg.

Even Tony Blair admits Mr Clegg finds himself in an interesting spot: “He is part of one of the most powerful companies in the world at a moment of enormous change in the world, and when technology is at the heart of that change.”

Choose wisely Nick.

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 Many brands are not distinct from one another-  and by using natural language processing we can prove it.

The question of competition is fundamental to any business. But understanding the competition can be complicated. Using machine learning, we can now understand what makes us distinct – or not – from our competition. And what makes them distinct from us.

Today, research firms use a two-by -two matrix to show where competing brands sit in relation to one another.

The two-by-two, you will recall, was invented by Dwight D Eisenhower, the US army general who ran allied command during the Second World War. He was the organisational genius who said,  “Plans are worthless but planning is invaluable.”

Unfortunately, the two-by-two has been misused over time. We all know the top right hand box is usually the most valuable position, so analysts sometimes manipulate their opinions to ensure that whatever it is they are trying to sell sits up there. There is even a firm called “Top Right”.

Another problem with the two-by-two and in fact any assessment of where your competition sits in relation to you is the difference between what should be and what is. Take a look at this analysis from research giant Gartner of IT firms. It gives the impression that all these IT firms are very different from one another.

But is this accurate? Working with data guru Marcelo LeCocq we used Natural Language Processing to read copy from all these brands and then compared that language to see how close the brands were to each other. We call this Brand Proximity.

The node link diagram above shows the distance of each brand from one another. The clustering to the left shows IT firms that describe themselves in a manner that is similar or the same. The three firms to the right, meanwhile, use language that is distinct from the competition.

Aryaka is described by Gartner as a “visionary IT company” as we see below.

Natural Language Processing supports the idea that it is a standout, as it describes itself differently to its peers (see the node link diagram below).

Meanwhile, Fortinet is a challenger brand, according to Gartner (see below).

But its’ communication is not distinct from the competition, says Natural Language Processing. In other words, the brands share proximity.

If communications from Fortinet read the same as its competitors, it follows that customers will not be able to tell the difference between the two brands. And if customers can not tell the difference, there is no difference that matters, as anything that makes Fortinet distinct is invisible to new customers anyway.

We all know your product is what the customer thinks it is: perception is reality. But now we can go further. Vocabulary really is destiny.

If brands don’t talk the talk, they risk never being asked to walk the walk. In this context, any sales they might enjoy are merely a product of the confusion of the customer to tell one brand from another.

That is not an opinion. It is now a demonstrable fact, as our video explains. 

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About the author

My name is Andy Pemberton. I am an expert in data visualization. I guide global clients such as Lombard Odier, the European Commission and Cisco on the best way to use data visualization and then produce it for them: reports, infographics and motion graphics. If you need your data visualized contact me at andy@furthr.co.uk or call 07963 020 103

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Record labels ate flush with cash from streaming services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal and more.

Covid-19 may have wreaked havoc on several industries worldwide, but the US music industry has hit an all time high of $12.2bn revenues in 2020.

A whopping 83 per cent of that revenue has come from streaming. There are now more than 50m tracks available on Spotify alone and over 40,000 new tracks uploaded daily.

But for many artists streaming has not been nearly so lucrative. In fact, Covid-19 is making the music biz unsustainable for all but the most successful artists.

Let’s say you are an up and coming artist who got 23,000 streams on Spotify of one song in the third quarter of 2020. Payment for those streams would come in at $72 which works out at 0.27 cents per stream.  At this rate you would earn New York City’s minimum wage of  $15 an hour  or $31,200 a year after you had received 13 million plays across various streaming services.

With Covid-19 also hampering live music, it is hard to see how a music artist that achieves only moderate success can survive.

Unsurprisingly, many artists are seeking out new routes to sustainability.

Independent artist represent the fastest growing sector in the globally recorded music industry. Artists direct grew by over 34 per cent during the pandemic, brining in $1.2billion in revenues, growing their share by over a point to 5.1 per cent.

Exploitation has always been a part of the music industry, but streaming makes the music industry unsustainable.

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It’s striking how much less noise there is in U.S. politics — even during an extraordinarily turbulent time — without Trump’s constant flow of unhinged tweets,  Brian Klaas, a professor of global politics at University College London, tweeted this month.

And misinformation about election fraud plummeted after Trump was kicked off, one research has firm found.

Since Trump has stopped live tweeting all day, citizens have enjoyed cognitive space to better understand what’s actually happening around us.

Experts suggests we should learn from this: Heads of state should not be allowed to tweet.

It can’t be right that the most powerful person in the world’s most visible lever on power are 280-character chunks of tossed-off thoughts published instantly, without review, on a medium run by a private company whose secret algorithms are designed to encourage outrage.

And it is insane that The Pew Research Center discovered that while the 116th Congress barely passed any substantive bills, its members collectively set records for their activity on Twitter.

Lawmaking, now, is more a matter of going viral than getting anything done.

That’s a trend we need to end. Twitter is better without Trump. But why stop there.  Let’s  keep kicking off more politicians, so they can get on with the day job.

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