Logos? Where we're going we don't need... actually, never mind, we definitely need them.

Together with Gunner, we spent a handful of months developing a family of logo animations and motion guidelines for our workspace pals at Dropbox.

Used for everything from backups to transferring to passwords, this clean, crisp system is built to communicate the Dropbox core design ethos: Composing Chaos. Guided by this north star, we set out to tell clear product stories that communicate each logo's purpose while ensuring unity across the family of animations.

As illustrated by our many explorations seen below, we initially cast a very wide net and patiently distilled ideas down until a series of animations that spotlight each unique product remained.

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Throughout the process, solving unique technical problems was required - not the least of these was the tentpole Dropbox logo. While some ideas started in After Effects, others happened in Cinema 4D, so porting from one program to another was the first major hurdle. Once rebuilt in 2D, the next challenge was exporting (all) animations to Lottie as .json files that could be rendered in real time. This meant all expressions/effects/inverted mattes/cameras/3D layers had to be converted into good ol' fashioned 2D space and keyframes. Phew!

This is a collection of my initial exploration: