Understanding motion design automation is essential for adapting to the rapid changes in design demands and technology.
James Britton’s recent article, “How designers and brands are morphing the next era of motion design,” paints a vivid picture of our current media landscape: a world of constant motion, where brands must exist in a perpetual state of motion design automation. This shift, driven by faster connection speeds and the ubiquity of screens, demands a new approach to branding and content creation. In this environment, motion design automation and design are no longer just elements, but core components of brand identity. This article will explore how Dataclay’s suite of tools—Templater®, QUE, and Projector, along with Autografs™ for Templater—are uniquely positioned to empower designers and brands in this dynamic age of motion design automation.
Table of Contents
The Challenge of Constant Motion
Britton highlights the tension between the fluid nature of motion and the need for brand consistency. Brands are increasingly required to produce vast amounts of motion assets across a multitude of platforms and devices. This demand for both originality and systematic consistency creates challenges for designers, who must balance creative experimentation with the need for scalable solutions. As Liza Enebeis of Studio Dumbar/DEPT notes, it’s about creating a “cookbook” with room for variation, ensuring longevity and adaptability.
In this context, motion design automation plays a crucial role in allowing brands to adapt their visual storytelling quickly and effectively across platforms.
Dataclay: The Solution for Scalable Motion Design
By leveraging motion design automation, creative teams can enhance their workflows and deliver compelling content faster than ever before.
Dataclay offers a powerful solution to these challenges by providing a suite of tools that streamline and automate the motion design workflow, allowing designers to focus on creativity without getting bogged down in repetitive tasks.
Templater
At the heart of Dataclay’s offerings, Templater is a workflow automation tool for Adobe After Effects that transforms the arduous task of customizing video content into an elegant workflow solution. It allows users to create dynamic templates in After Effects and link them to external data sources, such as spreadsheets or JSON files. This enables the automated versioning of video content, making it easy to produce many unique videos from a single template. With Templater, designers can:
- Customize Everything: Templater allows for the customization of text, images, branding, graphic elements, colors, and even embedded footage.
- Integrate Data Seamlessly: Templater can integrate with various data sources, including Google Sheets, tab-separated value files, and JSON files or feeds. This means that motion graphics can be data-driven, automatically updating with the latest information, and allowing for the creation of personalized video content.
- Maintain Design Integrity: Templater includes a patented Time Sculpting feature, which allows users to create rules that ensure that video templates maintain their design integrity, even when processing footage of different lengths. The Time Sculpting feature allows users to define rules for how layers in a composition should respond to changes in the duration of other layers, so the overall design is preserved even if the source content is modified.
- Automate Text Styling: Templater supports dynamic text styling, allowing font-face and direction properties to be controlled directly from a data source.
QUE
This Dataclay tool provides secure, flexible data management, using a JSON-based solution that requires no coding ability. QUE is designed to work seamlessly with Templater, providing a robust system for managing the data that drives dynamic video content. QUE can be used as a data source for Projector.
- QUE: This Dataclay tool provides secure, flexible data management, using a JSON-based solution that requires no coding ability. QUE is designed to work seamlessly with Templater, providing a robust system for managing the data that drives dynamic video content. QUE can be used as a data source for Projector.
Projector
Dataclay’s Projector application is a tool for automated, rapid rendering and distribution of customized video, available for both Windows and Mac. Projector works with Templater and QUE to automate tedious and repetitive distribution tasks, enabling users to render multiple customized videos at the same time and streamline their workflow. Projector supports Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) for archiving and can integrate with other storage services.
Autografs
Dataclay also offers pre-built After Effects compositions, called Autografs, that are rigged with Templater and placeholder data.. This provides designers with high-quality templates that can be quickly customized for various projects, giving designers a head start on their creative work.
Moreover, the integration of motion design automation with data sources allows brands to personalize their messaging and adapt to audience preferences in real time.
Meeting the Demands of the Motion-First Era
This emphasis on motion design automation positions Dataclay as a leader in the industry, providing the necessary tools for success.
Britton’s article emphasizes the need for motion design to be both systematic and bespoke, and Dataclay’s products are designed to meet this need. By enabling designers to build scalable systems with Templater, QUE, and Projector, while also providing tools for individual customization, Dataclay ensures that brands can maintain a consistent identity across all their motion assets. This system also empowers designers to focus on higher-level creative work rather than tedious manual tasks. The ability to integrate data from various sources, including spreadsheets and APIs, also allows for dynamic content that is constantly updated and relevant. This is essential for brands that need to adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape.
Conclusion
In the age of motion, brands must adapt to the demands of a constantly moving visual culture. Dataclay’s suite of products is especially well-suited to help brands meet the challenges of this new era. By providing tools for automation, customization, and data integration, Dataclay empowers designers to create high-quality, scalable, and engaging motion assets that resonate with audiences. As Britton notes, “Motion design has become a superpower for brands”. Dataclay provides the tools to unleash that power and thrive in this dynamic world.
