Daily Life of a Motion Graphics Designer

If you think you want to become a Motion Graphics Designer, you should, by all means, look into every aspect of what it’s like to work in the field. While it’s a highly creative profession, it’s not all fun and games: a lot of hard, mentally sweaty work is involved in the creation of animation on the computer, especially if your goal is to become a freelance motion graphics designer and have to grow a business while executing design assignments. A full 59% of people working in motion graphics design (or just plain motion design) are freelancers. For many people, this is one of the field’s great attractions.

What is a Motion Graphics Designer?

Motion graphics shouldn’t be confused with character animation (such as you see in classic Disney movies.) Motion graphics are, rather, graphic design elements to which animators give the illusion of life. Although motion graphics existed before the 1950s, that decade is when the field came into its own, originally through the medium of animated main-title sequences for motion pictures.

The openings of Billy Wilder’s The Seven-Year Itch (1955) and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) are prime examples of the groundbreaking sequences that set the tone for the movie to come. Both are the work of this type of animation’s key pioneer, Saul Bass. The two opening sequences combine kinetic typography, graphic devices, and drawn images. The result is opening credits that grab the audience’s attention. Bass’ tour de force was the six-minute end credit sequence for Michael Todd’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), which provides an entire synopsis of the movie in the form of kinetic sketches while the names of the actors with cameo roles in the film go by. It remains the ne plus ultra of end credits.

As far as the ne plus ultra of motion graphics at the start of a movie is concerned, the palm probably goes to the original Star Wars movie (recte: A New Hope.) The celebrated crawl that runs from the bottom of the screen to an imagined vanishing point in the middle of the screen was designed by Dan Perri, although the technique that held audiences spellbound for a minute and a half in 1977 actually dates back to the 1930s and both the Flash Gordon serials and Cecil B. De Mille’s Union Pacific, in which the disappearing crawl is superimposed on a pair of railway tracks.

In 1977, George Lucas had no choice but to lay the titles out on the floor and run the camera over them. With the subsequent advent of computer animation, such processes could be done virtually at the click of a mouse (and, in fact, the original Star Wars titles were redone using the new technology for later releases.) The ability to create computer-generated images with programs such as Adobe After Effects has completely transformed the motion graphics design industry. Creators now have a virtually unlimited toolbox at their disposal, and the days of awkwardly moving the camera to create the illusion of moving titles are long gone. Whereas the bounds of the possible were the problem faced by Motion Graphics Designers in the days of Saul Bass, the problem today is one of not doing too much and making sure the technology doesn’t become an end in itself. (A good example of doing an enormous amount with the available technology while still creating something satisfying and intelligible is the main title sequences for HBO’s Game of Thrones.)

Behind these little visual miracles sits the Motion Graphics Designer, who exists at the junction of graphic design and animation. To be good at this job, you need the graphic designer’s eye and sense of the visually attractive as well as the ability to operate the software software such as Adobe After Effects. The Motion Graphics Designer is responsible for both the vision and the execution, which are two very different processes, one that often requires traditional artists’ media, and one that calls for a computer. As a result, you’re unlikely to get bored being a Motion Graphics Designer.

Motion Graphics Designer Specializations

Motion graphics has spread horizontally into a variety of specializations. Although they continue to be employed extensively in film and television, they are also to be encountered in such diverse fields as 

• advertising,
• web design, and
• video game design.

Commercials with text that moves are, of course, not especially new, but recall that a commercial that incorporates motion graphics isn’t the same thing as an animated commercial, no more than the end credits for Around the World in Eighty Days are the same thing as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Animated animals and people come under the animator’s purview; the words around them and the brand’s logo are the motion graphic designer’s job.

As for web design, the venerable Amazon.com proves that you don’t need flashing buttons and text meandering all over the screen to be commercially successful. Still, a little visual pizzazz never hurts, and it’s the Motion Graphic Designer’s job to add it tastefully and circumspectly. You don’t want to give the user a headache, but there’s probably something on a page to which you want to draw attention by bringing it to life.

In the world of game design, the Motion Graphics Designer can have a variety of responsibilities, from title sequences to user interfaces with buttons that make the game playable, to instructions and other textual devices essential to the game, and, sometimes, even designing explosions and similar visual effects. Motion graphics don’t create the game, and they don’t bear much responsibility for visualizing the game’s world, but they play a key role in making the finished product playable, and, therefore, fun.

Starting Your Day

After a couple cups of coffee and a nourishing breakfast that, preferably, did more than just come out of the blender, a Motion Graphics Designer begins the day by making the trip to the office, or, if you’re a freelancer, by walking across the kitchen to a home office. Actual offices you have to go to will offer motion graphics designers either a cubicle or a larger space to foster collaboration with other designers. A computer capable of handling complicated graphics will await you that includes:

• a high-powered graphics card, 
• a ton of memory (you can go as high as 128 gigabytes),
• more than one monitor on which to work,
• After Effects, 
• Photoshop, Illustrator and PremierePro, 
• very possibly some non-Adobe programs such as Blender, Mocha Pro or Cinema 4D, and,
• if you’re working on a video game, most likely Unreal Engine.

9 AM:

Checking email and whichever system your company uses for inter-office communication (such as Slack or Microsoft Teams) is generally the first activity of anyone’s workday, and motion graphics designers are no exception. You’ll also probably have administrative matters to which you’ll need to tend before you can start work. If you’re a freelancer, you’ll still have email and other means of keeping in touch with your clients (and keeping your clients happy.) You’ll also have to start tracking your billable hours for the day, which you can do with specialized software, a spreadsheet, or a junior yellow legal pad and a mechanical pencil.

Many companies have so-called stand-up meetings early in the morning as well. These allow managers to make sure everyone’s shown up for work and gives them a chance to make sure where people are in their assignments. A stand-up can also offer a preview of the day’s activities. Product management experts have established that employees should actually stand for stand-ups; this keeps these meetings blissfully short.

Since your work as a motion graphics designer needs to be rendered before you can take a look at it, motion graphics designers need to check the computers first thing to check the rendering of the previous day’s work. Rendering computer animations can take close to forever, and the more complex they are, the longer they take to render. One efficient way to do this is to let the machines do their thing overnight. That means you can come in bright and early and either screen your new footage or curse the computer that screwed up while you were asleep.

11 AM:

Motion Graphics Designers generally work on very specific projects, either independently or as part of a team. Motion graphics sequences tend to be brief (the Game of Thrones opening credits ran for about 90 seconds per episode, which is exceptionally long), but that doesn’t mean that they can be completed quickly. The work can be extremely painstaking: computer animation isn’t built in a day; don’t forget that Pixar takes several years to finish a movie.

If you work in an office,, there may well be more meetings as the morning unfolds and before you can tackle actual design work. If you’re collaborating with other animators on a project, you need to make sure that you’re all on the same page. You may also meet with clients, although more and more of that is done remotely: apps such as Frame.io or Filestage allow the client to look at your work and comment on it from afar.

For the freelancer, the morning may unfold differently. You’ll still have clients who need to be serviced, be it by a phone call or video chat, and the morning is a better time to take care of that, as people are generally easier to reach before lunch. You’re the captain of your own ship, but ships require maintenance. That means keeping books, paying bills, and issuing invoices, which you may opt to do before lunch, or you can put it off until the end of the day if you’d rather expend your fresh morning energies on creative work.

2 PM:

With most of the morning devoted to procedural matters, the afternoon is most likely the time you’ll do most of your actual design work. That isn’t to say that you won’t have time to work on designing before two in the afternoon, but the afternoon is probably going to give you the prime creative hours of your day. You’ll thus be in front of your computer most of this time and working by yourself on whatever piece of a project has been entrusted to you. Some companies only employ one motion graphics designer, in which case you’ll be working on a whole rather than a part of one. The same applies to freelancers. This will likely be your favorite part of the day, since designers usually get into motion graphics so they can design, and not so they can go to meetings. That said, having the most interesting part of the day come in its second part isn’t such a bad thing; it will give you something to which you can look forward and keep you energized through the traditional afternoon slump that affects most office-dwellers.

5 PM:

With your design work for the day concluded, you’re probably going to set the computer to do the rendering work overnight before you leave the office so that you’ll be able to see the fruits of your labor in the morning. You’ll want to check with the other people working with you on your project to see where they’ve gotten in their efforts. A last look at the email and coworking spaces is also necessary, not that there are too many fires to put out at this hour of the day, but something may well have happened while you were designing the next ionic bit of animated graphics. Wash out your coffee mug, and you’re done for the day.

After Work

With the demands of the workday behind you, you’ll be able to unwind and enjoy a good dinner. Like many professional artists, you may spend your downtime working on something of your own. If you’re trained in traditional artist’s media, you can exercise your creative muscle by drawing or painting, or, if your training is more digital, you can create some work on the computer to please no one but yourself.

You may, however, find yourself staying in the office after hours, generally when there’s a deadline looming. Creative people are prone to procrastination (some call that waiting for inspiration), so meeting production deadlines can get stressful in the extreme. Crunch time is likely the only time you will find yourself working overtime, however. Freelancers are subject to the same crunch time issues, with the difference that they’re generally not paid at time-and-a-half for their midnight labors.

Learn the Skills to Become a Motion Graphics Designer at Noble Desktop

If you’ve decided that you want to make a career designing motion graphics, you’re going to need training, most particularly in the program that’s going to sit at the heart of your professional labors, Adobe After Effects. Noble Desktop, a well-known design and IT school based in New York City, can help you to become a motion graphics designer without a degree. Noble can teach you what you need to know with its Motion Graphics Certificate program, which includes instruction in After Effects, its sister video editing program Premiere Pro, and the 3D modeling program Cinema 4D. You’ll also have ample time and support to devote to the development of your professional portfolio. There is an even more thorough option, the Video Editing and Motion Graphics Certificate program, which includes everything in the Motion Graphics Certificate program, but is augmented by classroom modules in Adobe Audition, Adobe Photoshop, and state-of-the-art instruction in AI for Video & Motion Graphics. (The AI class is available separately, too.)

Both certificate programs include a number of 1-to-1 sessions with an experienced mentor who can assist you with everything from classroom matters to laying down a battle plan for the job market. You’ll also get a free retake option, be able to consult recordings of every classroom session, and receive fully live and fully hands-on instruction that will have you learning by doing rather than just sitting there like a lump trying to make sense out of video tutorials. You’ll be the recipient of Noble Desktop’s proprietary classroom materials and workbooks, which will be yours to keep for future reference. You’ll also earn a New York State-licensed certificate for your labors at the end of the course, which you can exhibit on your all-important LinkedIn profile.