Creating an Animated Logo

After designing the improved flat design logo, I decided it would be a good addition and demonstration of my 2D compositing skills to animate the new logo.

Firstly i had the idea of summarising what the company does in the animation. We chose to suffix our name with "house" to resemble the name of a production house or design house so I chose to manipulate this. I located the three areas or media that the company is trying to specialise in; 

• Picture - This will be every image work that the company produces whether that be stills, photos or video. I chose to use this first for two reasons - the company currently has mainly short films on their online portfolio - the second reason was to allow the audience to make the connection to the picture house motif
• Sound - Although i'm not sure that a "Sound House" is in existence, I thought it was an appropriate element as the company focuses on music video and often do their own recordings and live lounges - it is an important discipline for Malmo House
• Design - Finally design was chosen as the company understand the importance of good design. I chose to put design last as - because it is such a vague discipline and can be applied to both sound design and picture design. The company does do some design work - but their sound design and picture design take priority.

I chose to use After Effects to animate the logo. I kept the animation simple as to not overcomplicate the flat design of the newly renovated logo. I found it was more aesthetically pleasing to have the animation slide right to left. Even though this is the opposite way that English is read, it helped to balance the logo better and perhaps even was more of a surprise to the audience. By using easy ease keyframes I was able to add an "overkill" effect almost making the words look like they skid into place. I felt this was a more organic movement and again added aesthetically to the design.

Finally, when I was happy with the movement of the exits and entrances of the words I repeated the "*MALMO" layer to round the animation off. I thought this would be useful if the logo was ever used in a loop situation or for gifs etc.

My last stage was to export the animation not only as the finished ident movie file but also as a sequence of JPEGs. I did this so that, in Indesign, I was able to created a sequential image interaction with the logo - the user can now run their finger across the logo and control the animation - I thought this interactivity would help raise the production standards of the iPad publication.