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Earrhythmia

Motion design, while quite an abstract label on its own, is responsible for the moving design elements that millions see on television worldwide every day. Motion designers earn a living making graphic design come alive over time, whether it's gorgeous typography in a film's opening credit sequence or helping to sell detergent. And I've noticed one common thread that winds between all of the most talented motion and broadcast designers I know: they are all fanatical zealots of music.

No matter how narrow or broad their aesthetic tastes are, music is a major driving force in most motion designers' lives, and many of them are, or used to be, musicians. In thinking about this more, I've now consciously realized that just as the best character animators could be pretty decent actors, the musically-inclined (or even the musically sensitive) have an edge on being motion designers.

Mapping Music to Motion

Motion design requires two very specific abilities: executing graphic design and then being able to animate it over time. While most folks have a good vocabulary for describing the former, many creatives don't spend much time considering a language for the latter. Tempo, pauses, cues, crescendos, anticipation, tension, release...all of these things can describe both music and animation. Speed is design density over time. Pauses are temporal negative space. Cues are used in the placement of specific visual elements in time rather than space. Crescendos are the emotional results of changes in volume or intensity over time.

Like a musician, a good motion designer will build and release tension in the viewer over time, using stability of form or dissonance of elements, to create a narrative, no matter how abstract, that will get the viewer's attention and communicate something.

An understanding of musical principles helps greatly in understanding and, in my opinion, executing motion design. Building the state of the screen from nothing to something is like the introduction to a song. Will it be similar or dissimilar to the rest of the piece? Does the melody (read: design system) build over time? Does it come into being suddenly? Will it create relaxation or tension? Will it have a consistent rhythm or be erratic?

One only needs to look at the work of directors, motion designers and animators to see similarities...you can see musical lyricism in their work. The great Saul Bass was one of the first designers to precisely synchronize relatively abstract graphic design to music (in commercial films, anyway), inheriting the rhythms and cues of the soundtrack. The work of Chris Cunningham shares a lot in common with the music of his muse and client, Aphex Twin: frenetic, disjointed, disturbing, but always with the tiniest wink of absurdity that makes it palatable and whimsical even as it turns our stomachs...he's also the first, I think, to introduce visual glitches synched with music cues. The crazy brains behind TokyoPlastic create a world that is enticing and terrifying in a very stark and abstract way, with excellent sound design and use of silence to build and release tension.

Elements * (Space/Time) = Motion + Music

The arrangements of elements in space and over time describes both motion design and music composition. Anytime you have an audience, a time-based medium, and a message to convey, consider this principle when creating, or assessing, motion graphics.

Just as most composers place instruments in physical space, so must the design elements be carefully arranged. Movement to the eyes can be just as overwhelming as motion to the ears; even trippy, psychedelic rock or electronic music rarely has more than one or two sounds actively panning in the stereo field at once (unless, of course, overwhelming one's audience is the whole point). If all movement is fast, its homogenity of tempo can make it fatiguing to watch; even in the fastest drum-n-bass techno (we're talking 180bpm and up here) has almost always one element that's playing at half the tempo most of the time (often the bass) as a counterpoint...when that's not done, the tune sounds repetitive and tiring to listen to.

Great composers also use repeated themes to give a piece cohesion. Motion designers don't get to choose between melodies, french horns, or string sections, but they can choose to repeat movement, shapes, colors, type styles, line weights, or any number of elements to convey related information or themes.

And, finally, start studying the music that you love carefully and assess it in these ways, as well. Not only might one's sense of motion design improve, it might even shed a little light into the amazing process of music making...and even educate yourself on why you enjoy certain kinds of music over others.