Motion guidelines for your brand – what are they and are they worth it?

We all know motion graphics are a highly effective form of communication and at P+S we’ve been shouting about this for a while. But handled badly, video content can end up muddling your brand and confusing your customers. Luckily, there’s a simple trick to getting it right: motion graphics guidelines.

We’ll get to them in a minute but first, let’s do a quick refresher on why video is something you should really embrace for your business.

Video: why it’s worth getting into

Video continues to be one of the fastest growing methods of communication. And with 96% of people turning to video to learn more about a product or a service it’s pretty hard not to agree that it should be part of your business strategy.

Not sure of the benefits? Here’s your at-a-glance guide:

• It showcases your brand in motion – communicating your personality, distinct voice and vision into engaging and attention-grabbing materials that helps your business stand out from the competition.‍
• Using motion graphics forms an emotional link to your product or service – drawing on human emotions, feelings as a basis around your content creates a connection with your audience that builds brand loyalty.‍
• Efficient communication – using motion graphics you can effectively convey complexinformation or ideas through dynamic visual storytelling, making it easier for audiences to understand and retain key messages.
• Motion graphics are highly versatile – you can rinse and re-use your stunning animations from website animations to social media to broadcast campaigns. This allows your businesses to expand it’s reach and connect with new audiences in a way that doesn’t break the bank.
• Using motion in UI can enhance the overall user experience on a website or app, increasing the time visitors spend on the site and improving chances of conversion.

Traditional barriers to using motion graphics

Well, all the above sounds great, right? However, even though the benefits of motion graphics are well established, decision makers will still often turn down video projects. Let’s look at why.

A recent report found that 19% of people lack the time, 10% of people don’t know where to start and 24% of people feel video is too expensive.

This is understandable. Creating a video can be a lengthy process. (Have you ever looked over the shoulder of an animator doing their thing? It’s a snore fest.) And you know, time equals money. Truly great creative comes at a cost but, at the time of writing, AI tools haven’t evolved to a place where they can churn out stunning, effective and on-brand motion graphics at the click of a button. Probably next week though, amiright?

As for knowing where to start, this becomes a big issue without real guidance in place onhow to communicate your brand. A lack of clear vision around your motion output ultimately creates a lack of consistency and can reduce your brand integrity. Think about it… creating unique, different interpretations of your brand for every video is like starting from scratch every time. You wouldn’t ask 10 different designers to create social posts without brand guidelines, one of them will probably select comic sans and word art to work up their masterpiece!

Why brand motion guidelines are the answer

OK, so those are some pretty hefty considerations. What’s the solution? We gave this away at the top, but you guessed it! Brand motion guidelines. Up until now, they’ve been something of an afterthought, the final page in a brand guidelines PDF that talks about using 1080p and brand compliant subtitles, but it’s so much more than that now.

Motion is embedded across every touchpoint of your brand

It’s everywhere from logo animations to transitions, text animations, graphic language, social templates and even in the minute detail of how UI bits animate. If you want to create a wide array of video assets, guidelines form the robust design system that streamlines the whole process and ensures a strong brand presence.

To keep track, you need guidelines that:

• detail how those key elements are animated
• show best practice examples
• provide templates to create content quickly and consistently

Consistency is crucial

As our collective attention span gets shorter, it’s vital that your visual communication looks and feels instantly recognisable, even in a few seconds. Think about how you feel when you see an Apple ad or your favourite football team walking on to the pitch: you may not know what’s about to happen but your brain will link together past experiences with that brand/team by association, informing how you feel and how excited you are for what comes next.

Motion guidelines are essentially a kit of parts, and they shift depending on your brand and what you want to achieve. But as a rough guide those parts include:

• logo idents
• motion principles (overarching movement, easing curves)
• typography
• transitions / graphic language
• social templates
• UI & web animations
• video architecture (lower thirds, subtitling, watermarks)
• video guidance (formats, grading, stock footage and audio guidance, EAA compliance)

Once guidelines have been worked up and agreed, you can roll them out to private or public-facing online digital guidelines which display all the best practice for each element, along with updatable templates (that we call ‘video toolkits’) for designers to use – having one source of truth for all things motion. And we’ve created a little animated explainer that breaks down what a P+S video toolkit is.

The European Accessibility Act (EAA): how it’s affecting motion content

The EAA is reshaping expectations for how digital content including video is produced and delivered. While compliance is a legal requirement across the EU, it’s also fast becoming a marker of brand credibility and modern practice worldwide.

Ensuring your video content is accessible (with captions, audio descriptions, and inclusive design) not only future-proofs your output but demonstrates a genuine commitment to reaching, and respecting, all audiences. In a global market that values inclusion, accessibility isn’t just about regulation, it’s about reputation.

One of the best ways to improve your compliance is through your motion guidelines. By having one central store of rules, templates and toolkits you can make sure future content will always be in line with EAA requirements.

Want to see this all in action?

Here at P+S, we have developed our own motion guidelines for public viewing.

Here’s a little video to introduce them:

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And here are the guidelines to view online.

If you fancy finding out more about how video could work for your brand, or need some help putting together your own guidelines, then drop us a line at marketing@proctorsgroup.com