Motion Style Guides

During my time at Pixel Power I would often ask clients to provide sample videos of their graphics along with  a motion and style guide. However not everyone was a designer and understood why a guide was needed, so I decided to put together a collection of assets showing an example and a few tips on why.

A motion and style guide is to provide guidance to designers who supply template designs and materials. It will also provide template builders a list of materials they should receive from designers.

What is a motion style guide?

A set of materials that enable someone to recreate a motion design in any motion graphic software. The materials normally consist of a detailed document, examples of the final output and any elements required to build the template.

Essential elements:

• Logos
• Fonts
• Colour information

Motion style guides don’t have to be perfect, but they do need to contain helpful and pertinent information.

A motion style guide is not for presentation purposes!

Guidance Notes on Design

Guide rather than preach – remember there maybe limitations and restrictions limiting how or when a design can be used, so build in some flexibility. Sometimes designs can be pushed to breaking point, a designer and template builder need to collaborate to work through these issues.

Try to avoid confusion by limiting the rules which apply to the templates, at the same time try to think of as many scenarios as possible. For instance, if the channel has only 30 programmes then test these broadcast titles.

Think about Programme Titles and how they should be displayed, 1 line, 2 lines or 3 lines and how the title splits will be achieved, all software will word wrap differently!

Keep the project simple and organised, especially with files and naming conventions. Everyone builds and designs differently, but when handing over files and projects make sure that they are organised and consistent in such a way anybody can follow the methodology.