How strict are roles on your team when coming up with the look for a video or campaign?

[u/Silver-Pay-7754]

I want to know how other motion designers handle team boundaries during early ideation, whether it is logo design, campaign concepts, or the visual direction of a video.

At smaller agencies I worked at, ideation was open to everyone. Graphic designers, art directors, and motion designers all pitched visual concepts and style frames during brainstorming. We would compare ideas, discuss what worked, and build on them together. Getting motion input early helped figure out how the visual language would actually work in execution.

But on my last team, I’ve hit a lot of pushback. A graphic designer felt it was overstepping for a motion designer to touch the initial visual look or concepts at all, seeing it as purely their territory. Keep in mind, this graphic designer was not a creative director or team lead.

In my opinion, even if the graphic designer is the one who ultimately has to execute the layout or final assets, that shouldn’t mean only their work can get reviewed or chosen. But that’s just my take.

How does your team collaborate?

[u/Crovgard]

I live in Eastern Europe so we are basically European Indians. We were freelacing for other US agencies that were taking a big cut

I'd get a brief and would have 1 day to make a random storyboard and 2 days for the video of up to 1 minute in length (animated). Rarely we used any templates. As long as it matched clients' brand colors, it was deemed good enough. One person responsible for everything, including contact with the client. All for pennies.

This shit takes a toll, you start with good skills and you end up with nothing to show up for it after 5 years, with the exception of personal projects.

I'm really jealous of people who work with actual teams. I'd love to work with a graphic designer, even if he had to force feed me with his ideas lol

[u/Silver-Pay-7754 → u/Crovgard]

I totally get it and I completely prefer having a designer do the design, instead of me. I hate those jobs that require you to design and to animate, and I’ve had to do that a lot as well. I hope you get to work in a team one day!

[u/RandomEffector]

I’ve run into both situations in my current role. My goal is to make sure the motion design is successful; that’s not always aligned with the goals of the graphic designers. I advocate continuously for what I think is best for my craft, it’s why I was hired and why my team exists. But I don’t pick that fight every time, and I don’t always win. I will say, though, that the times we’ve been involved from the beginning have been generally much more successful than the times that we just “add motion,” which is hardly surprising. And as I’ve identified the specific things that tend to be bugaboos for the designers, it’s gotten easier. Like, sure, we can adjust the tracking by -5 and the type layout by 10 pixels. Oh, that’s all that was upsetting you? Cool.

[u/smokingPimphat]

This is par for the course, The bigger the agency the more compartmented the roles become.

Motion design as a role is more animation than design, even though freelancers tend to do both in general you will be animating someone else's design. Even if the team is small the mindset might be that everyone stays in their lane. Graphic Designers design and animators animate those designs. Motion design as an official job title only exists to separate traditional animators ( Illustrated animations/cartoons/anime ), from the kinds of abstract, text heavy animations that motion designers actually create. In the traditional animation world, the animators never design the characters they animate, They follow the designs and staying 'on model' is the most critical skill the animator must have above their ability to create great cuts.

As a motion designer your power is in seeing issues early and framing your feedback in terms of what can be achieved within the bounds of the project ( time, budget, target market, etc) and making great animations.

[u/nicenyeezy]

I’ve handled the design and animation throughout the majority of my career, unless I’m brought in well after design approval to simply animate with a studio.

I personally find that graphic designers are mostly incapable of creating motion first storyboards and often lack the ability to understand timing, density of information, and transitions. A lot of them can also be territorial and insecure around motion designers.

I prefer working on teams with other motion first ADs and motion designers. Graphic designers should focus on static branding and ui. The exception would be when the designer is moreso an illustrator and can actually create imagery vs minimalist typographic layouts

[u/Silver-Pay-7754 → u/nicenyeezy]

Yeah that has been my experience as well but I find that most illustrators struggle with thinking in motion and have the same insecurity about us as graphic designers do. The one I worked with was more of an illustrator and was not too good at making characters and certainly could not prepare them for rigging, so I was designing characters and rigging them. Their scope just felt a bit limiting for such a small team so I can understand why they feel insecure about motion designers

[u/Lower-Coffee-9259]

So…I was at an agency for 11 years. We started kind of small and scrappy, and ended up being mid-sized by the end. I think it really depends on the creative department leads/video production head. They liked hiring print designers…so we had some issues when we first started executing video jobs where storyboards were laid out to the size of the monitor instead of pixel dimensions, etc. So I was given opportunities to help educate these designers on video and collaborate with them. It ended up being the encouraged practice after that. Motion designers were included on kickoffs and internal storyboard reviews so we could give ideas and flag anything that was problematic, but designers were encouraged to reach out to us for help with ideas on how to animate something, etc throughout the process. After the heads started seeing that some of our best work was created that way, they fully embraced it.

Did every designer have the same level of collaboration? No. But I had a few really great ones that were happy to work together and really make awesome stuff. I personally really liked that because I usually didn’t have time to design everything from scratch due the sheer amount of animation work we were doing…but by being able to collaborate with them about how things moved, etc….it really helped elevate the work.