“The technology industry, like all industries, follows cycles, and the pendulum is swinging back to the broad, empowering philosophies that underpinned the early social web. But we’re going to face a big challenge with re-educating a billion people about what the web means.”
- Anil Dash, The Web We Lost
Toward the end of 2018, I was approached by Alexis Lloyd, the Head of Design Innovation at Automattic, to create an animation around a talk she had written and had been giving at design and tech conferences. Her piece was a guided meditation about the current landscape of the Internet, its users, and the future of the open web.
One of the major challenges around designing for this animation was achieving the proper balance between representation and abstraction. With such richly visual language, the imagery itself needed to carry the message—but remain loose enough for the viewer to have their own subjective interpretations.
The animation was also delivered in separate video & audio components, so that viewers around the world can download and translate the meditation into their own languages. You can read the transcript and access the files here.
PROCESS
I started with solid vector line animation, followed by an effects pass using noise and turbulence.
Colors, too, were animated first as simple shapes, rendered in separate passes for each color. Noise and blending modes were then applied.
selected Styleframes
