Motion
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Mading.com Demo
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Merry Chrismas
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A few years ago, I decided to focus on motion graphics for grad school instead of going deeper into traditional graphic design, and I had a couple of reasons for that. First, things like layout and branding really don’t take that long to pick up — one or two years is usually enough to get a solid grasp. As for type design, that’s something that takes decades of practice, not just a few years in school. So if I wasn’t going to keep pushing further in traditional graphic design, I basically saw two paths ahead of me: UI/UX or motion graphics.
I chose motion graphics partly because there are plenty of resources to self-teach UI/UX, and partly because, when I was a kid, I actually wanted to be a film director. Even though I didn’t fully understand the craft back then, I always had fun experimenting with motion design during undergrad.
But the deeper I got into it, the more I realized that motion graphics is way more complex than it looks. In fact, I think calling it a branch of graphic design is a huge misunderstanding. People often lump it into design because, compared to animation, motion graphics feels closer to a visual expression of graphic design — it’s more abstract, and the movement doesn’t have to follow the laws of physics the way animation usually does. But it’s not as simple as just taking a poster and making it move.
Motion graphics is such a broad field. You can think of it in a few categories: 2D or 3D, full character-driven animation or simple icon movement, Houdini-style procedural animation or keyframe-based work in After Effects. For animators, motion graphics is something they can “scale down” into from animation. But for a graphic designer, it’s really like starting over and learning an entirely new discipline.