Why Choosing the Best Animation Style for You Matters
You’ve planned to incorporate the power of animation into your brand communication strategy, and are now searching for the best animation style for your brand. Having worked across a wide range of video production styles, we here at Synima know that there isn’t one style that triumphs over all – it really comes down to what best suits you.
With more videos vying for the attention of your customers than ever, having a solid and recognizable image is vital, and knowing how to balance the style you’ve chosen with the specific needs of each kind of video you produce is what will allow you to skillfully build brand identity, increase brand recall, and forge emotional connection.
From hand-drawn animation to 2D and 3D, we’ll discuss why an animation style is important for your brand, and help you figure out the best choice for you. We know that building and sticking to a brand identity is a big decision, so we’ve got you covered if you want further help – with 25 years of experience fostering audience engagement through strong visual storytelling, we know just what it takes to build and maintain a strong animation style made perfect for each client.
Clarify Your Brand’s Core Message and Unique Selling Proposition
Before committing to a style of animation, you’ll need to define your brand message, as having a strong, clear corporate brand voice is the necessary first step to finding the style that aligns with it.
Conducting a Brand Audit
An analysis of your brand’s ethos, mission and USP will help to clarify which animation style works in your favor, and knowing your current position in the market can reveal the qualities your animation style should focus on. Having a consistent team of people working on the audit all the way through to production can help make this process more streamlined.
Choosing an Animation Style that Meshes with your Brand Persona
Brand alignment is more useful than what style is deemed the most impressive – you want the visual identity of your animation to be future-proof and cohesive. Your audience expects a certain personality and relationship from your brand, so make it absolutely clear, is yours friendly, authoritative or playful? The animation style you choose should reflect this.
Audience Insight: The Cornerstone of Style Selection
When approaching animation for different platforms, you should aim to be both flexible and cohesive. While your style should remain consistent and recognizable, you should have enough room to tailor your video towards different audiences, like trimming it down for social media video content, or tying in live-action video clips for internal training.
As long as these tweaks don’t impact your choice of style, there are many great ways to account for audience targeting and platform optimization whilst keeping up a unique look!
Types of Animation Styles: Finding Your Perfect Fit
Here we’ll discuss some of the different animation styles for branding as well as their strengths to help you find the right match.
Understanding Key Formats and Hybrid Animation Styles
If your brand goals include being authoritative and helpful, then 3D animation might be the right choice for you. With a focus on detail and clarity, you can break down more complex topics and “film” what live-action cannot. A 2D animation style on the other hand is more expressive and playful, good for brands who want to position themselves as approachable and friendly.
If you’re a brand that wants to entertain and inform in a fun, charming way, and you want to reach out to a much larger audience, then another style to consider is stop-motion animation. Our collaboration with the World Dental Federation is a great example of how stop-motion can make topics accessible, as well as position a brand as approachable. Alternatively, those who want a sleek, professional visual approach can opt for motion graphics – which is a great medium for tying in branding elements like your logo and color scheme in a clear, organized manner.
Stuck between two choices? A hybrid style might be the right fit for you, especially if you have quite different target audiences who need tailoring to – this way, you can create one unique style and then lean more on the medium that suits the current audience.
Visual Consistency: Reinforcing Brand Identity Through Design
Once you’ve chosen a key format, you’ll need to craft an animation style for your brand that adheres to your brand guidelines. Unless you want to rebrand along with your new animation style, then each animation element, like your color scheme, character design and typography, should match your guide and reinforce the persona you’ve built.
You should keep these elements consistent across the animated videos you produce, and shouldn’t override them to invoke a certain mood or follow a specific trend if it’s not a very conscious decision. We know that meshing your established design with the needs of each video can be tricky, so we’ve got you covered if you need a trained eye to help you out!
Crafting a Compelling Narrative: Animated Characters and Engaging Storytelling
Using storytelling to enhance brand animations can transform your animation from a mere visual tool to a powerful ambassador of your brand.
To build a successful narrative, first consider your audience’s pain points and aspirations. From there, you can create a story of how your product or service addresses these points through a character that people can relate to. Creating an emotional connection through narrative-driven branding doesn’t mean you have to limit yourself to a chronological story – there are many impactful narrative structures to choose from! Whether it’s a “how I got here” brand narrative, or an animation that weaves together multiple smaller stories, storytelling can take your chosen animation style to the next level.
Budget, Production, and Project Management Best Practices
The cost of animation production will vary based on multiple factors, so having a realistic plan and production timeline is a must.
While every project will have its own budget, there are some general ways to estimate cost. Animations containing motion graphics and simpler, 2D character designs will inevitably be cheaper, as will short videos and those without additional features like voice overs, script writing and sound effects. Deciding to partner with a production company means you reap all the benefits of efficient, high-quality work and the cohesion of an experienced creative team.
Balancing the trade-offs between a cost-effective animation and a fully-fledged cinematic piece can be difficult, but we also believe that you can have both quality and affordability, so we’re committed towards bringing both. Check out our portfolio to see the many ways in which we’ve supported clients with their animation requirements.
Collaboration and Feedback Loops with Animation Teams
Knowing how to work with animation studios will set you up for maximum efficiency, so here’s what you can expect. Starting with a briefing process, this first stage is the time to bounce ideas back and forth and nail down exactly what animation you want to produce. From this point, the creative team will explain their vision – here at Synima, we create a detailed concept, with bespoke style frames and storyboards to ensure that our client’s mission is realized fully and accurately.
After that, regular updates and feedback meetings will make ensure that the animation is on track and aligned, all the way up until post-production. With full transparency at each stage of the production process, a communicative creative partnership is fostered.
Iterative Review Process
Collaborating with a production partner means that you get more out of the process than one animated video. A fully-fledged service should offer you an iterative review process, where you can view the animation as it is so far and offer feedback. Refining the animation along the way not only ensures that your vision is met, but accounts for anything the brainstorming process may have overlooked, paving the way for further potential. At Synima, this way of working is second nature to us and always ensure a smooth and efficient production process.
Evaluating Performance and Improving your Animated Video
Tracking the ROI of animations is an often overlooked aspect of the process, but it is crucial if you want to extract the most out of them. Performance metrics to look out for include observable stats, like engagement rates, view duration and conversion tracking, as well as soft ROI, which includes brand recall and audience sentiment.
We cover strategy in our service offering to support clients past production and ensure that their animation reaches its full potential.
To summarize: How to Always Pick the Perfect Animation Style for Your Brand
Now that you know how to pick and tailor your style, our final piece of advice would be to remain consistent. A consistent brand animation style, made more effective through iterative improvement and ongoing refinement, will help to create an online presence that is instantly recognizable and continually reliable. Audience loyalty is one of the most valuable things you can earn, and a cohesive image proves to audiences that they can expect the same level of quality that they’ve trusted in before, and can confidently invest in it again.
If you would like further advice on how to choose the best animation style for your brand, or want to partner with an animation company who have over 25 years of experience, feel free to contact us at [email protected].
Head of Marketing at Synima