Making a splash
The news this week that Slack was acquired in a mega deal by Salesforce was very interesting to me for a number of reasons. First of all, there are very few acquisitions that immediately feel like a true fit, but this one just really makes a lot of sense to me. Slack has been facing increased competition by Microsoft Teams and having the backing of Salesforce really revs up their competitive firepower. Salesforce is also a major competitor to Microsoft overall, so it makes a ton of sense for them to buy a company like Slack, which has a widely-used product that competes directly with Teams, and also perfectly fills a void in Salesforce’s suite of cloud apps (sorry, Chatter).
It was also interesting to me because, like most folks in a technology-facing industry these days, I frequently use and love Slack — and in my previous career as an account executive, I sold a customized version of Salesforce to arts and nonprofit organizations. I never worked directly for Salesforce, but since my old company was a partner of theirs, I feel a kinship with the company. It’ll be very interesting to see what they do with Slack in the future and how this all plays out!
I thought this news would be a great opportunity to try my hand at another animation design challenge. I noticed that Slack has a “blink-and-you-miss-it” splash screen on their Android app. From what I saw of it, it’s just a black background with Slack’s logo and wordmark, centered in white. Not the most interesting splash screen, so I challenged myself to make a new one. Here’s what I came up with:
I thought it would be interesting to take the logo apart and separate it by the 4 colors, and then rapidly bring them together — the symbolism here being that Slack helps bring employees together. I then thought about making the logo do a little spin, but that seemed too fanciful. Instead, I decided to have the “put together” logo quickly pump outward, as if it were a heartbeat. More fake symbolism here, but I guess one could say that Slack is at the heart of your company’s communications — cheesy but often true! Maybe I should be on their design team *and* their marketing team?
This was a fun challenge because it’s the first time I’ve tried my hand at animating an existing company’s assets. It was easy enough to find the logo in vector format, which made it simpler to pick apart and put back together again.
What do you think of my little splash screen concept? Let me know your thoughts!
