A motion designers take on F5 Festival in an ad agency

I went to F5 Festival a couple of months ago and this is my long overdue write up. F5 is a creative, design, animation, history, and technology conference that takes place in New York every year. As with many other conferences, F5 was more about inspiring people to do more with their abilities, rather than teaching them specific skills and processes. It was a broad range of topics that seemed completely disparate but had the underlying lesson of taking risks to create value and opportunities for yourself.

Going to F5 got me thinking specifically about 3 things. Growing up in an agency as a designer/animator in a production environment, the necessity of using and improving both your hands and brain, and the application of our craft outside of traditional motion graphics into other mediums to increase our own value.

Patrick Clair, creator of animation shop Antibody, talked about the importance of using both your hands and brain. Having an idea and executing it to match your vision is the essence of any successful designer/animator. Based on agency structure, it’s a skill we are rarely able to refine. Agencies are conducive to development as a designer/animator in the hand sense, but not so much the brain. In large agencies, individual roles are defined, people in charge of coming up with ideas and those executing them tend to be separate. There is also little practice at idea articulation. This becomes apparent the larger an agency is. The upside is ad agencies offers better structure and resources. What we lose in articulation with our brain, we gain in industry knowledge while developing our hands. Things like bids/treatments/producer relationships and processes are things schools don’t teach, and smaller shops tend to not concern younger employees with. This isn’t to say designers/animators in agencies are resigned to being pure hands forever. We just have to do more.

Eddie Opara, a partner at Pentagram, talked about his experience collaborating with MIT Sensibility Lab creating MAKR SHAKR, a custom cocktail making system using robotic arms. The project involved creating an identity, app, and data visualizations. The information was complex due of the variations of drinks, alcohol consumption levels of users, and social aspects of people with similar drink interests. The app was built in 30 days and it looked beautiful. It was not only functionally complex, but visually engaging. It demonstrated the potential of what a team with higher interdisciplinary knowledge could be capable of. A design and animation team with the knowledge of code and development with a development team that respected the importance of design and animation was what seemed to drive the project to succeed.

The ability for motion design to greatly improve data visualization and aid usability for new interactions is nothing new. As agencies increasingly try to build digital products for clients in house with unrealistic timelines, it becomes a struggle for motion designers to effectively contribute with their given abilities. Digital products made in-house by agencies tend to be boring and unrefined, not because of user experience, but because budgets and timelines stop them from being developed into something more. One solution I believe that can address that struggle is for motion designers to learn how to code.

Learning how to code, even a little, to convey our motion sensibilities in a digital product environment is one way of becoming a brain in an agency. Things like installations, VR, mobile applications all run on code-centric platforms. Without that root level knowledge, designers/animators in the advertising setting will remain hands, creating at best visceral, informative, and emotional sequences, and at worst forgettable 5 second social posts. Most people in our industry want to be brains, and to be that, we have to be able to adapt to the agency system to fully contribute our craft.

Advertising agencies try to be at the forefront of culture and technology, but in reality are mostly risk averse and limited by constraints of client whims and budgets. As a designer in general, if your abilities are only within what is expected of your position, it becomes difficult to be in a position have a voice, making you a hand indefinitely. Whereas if you are able to explore areas that are unconventional to your job, yet effectively crosses into other disciplines, you will have carved yourself a niche within the agency setting.

Just like how agencies used to not have VFX supervisors and animators since the work used to be farmed out to vendors, motion and prototyping teams are becoming a necessity to any successful agency. More and more agencies are now trying to embrace UX and product design within its doors also to compete with companies bringing their design and marketing in house. To fully contribute and be a competent bridge between motion design and coding would not only help any designer/animator in a hierarchical and fast paced company stand out, you will also become a highly valued voice that very few people are capable of displacing.

That is one way of becoming a brain in an agency, and one direction I believe any young motion designer in an agency can grow towards. Needless to say, learning to competently code is not is it accomplishable overnight. There are also many alternative ways and skills one can learn to succeeding in an agency, and coding is just one specific way I saw at F5.