I was Sentry's Senior Motion designer for 3 years, delivering value by extending its powerful brand identity into animation. As part of my work, I developed a graphics package for Sentry's online video content.
Challenge
Develop a motion graphics style that matches Sentry's existing brand guidelines and empowers our team to make better video content.
Role
• Senior Motion Designer
• Animator
Process
Background elements
I started by studying Sentry’s branding. Behind colorful characters and a Glyph that runs around with gadgets and laptops, Sentry uses colors and patterns to infuse play and creativity into the never ending hunt for bugs. Looking through the brand guidelines I found patterns by the brilliant Steven Lewis. These patterns could be even more playful, if they just moved around a bit. So they became the foundation of our graphics package.
Type Treatment
Kinetic type is both is a timeless example of motion graphic design, and its most overused element. I played around with stretching and twisting Sentry’s ad copy, but found the motion conflicted with our deadpan, concise writing style.
So after trying a couple of clever moves, I stepped back and decided to let the type simply be, landing on the screen like a punchline. I saved the funky moves for the logo lockup, which you’ll see below.
Glyph Animation: making the logo Dance
Next, we needed a logo lockup: a rendering of the company logo for end tags, stingers, and other moments that could use the logo as a graphic icon. I loved Sentry’s logo glyph the moment I saw it: it’s a pyramid, a maze, a path, and it’s iconic. The Sentry product uses the glyph as a loading animation, drawing it one stroke at a time and then reversing its drawing. to scale up for online video, we needed something more, so I sketched a few different motions.
The problem with most of these is that they didn’t feel powerful enough. Sentry is a serious tool for serious developers, even if it doesn’t take itself too seriously. So its glyph motion needed to reflect that power, and I decided using two axes of motion was the best way to represent its strength.
Results
With these elements in place, we used our graphics package on a wide range of content: online ads, tutorials, webinars, and even events. Even the sales team adopted the graphic style for their video explainer, Sentry in Six Minutes.