I got tapped by the creative genius Matt Eller from Afternoon, Inc. to help build out a bullet-proof toolkit for the folks at The New York Times. At first I was kind of like “wait…you’re serious?!” and then we got down to some late night template building collaboration goodness.
The brief was clear: create a toolkit that could stand up to the rigor of a newsroom: fast-paced, modular, and impossible to break. Working in After Effects, I architected a dynamic template system that handled nearly every variable of typography, color, layout…all through expression-driven controls.
Every component was built for speed, scalability, and precision:
Dynamic text fields automatically resized and reflowed to maintain layout integrity.
Key animation parameters were governed by sliders and pickwhips, giving editors granular control without risk of desync.
Procedural easing curves ensured motion consistency across templates — adhering to motion design principles of rhythm, anticipation, and balance.
The result was a mathematically elegant motion system that fused design with engineering. It’s an invisible framework that makes motion design as fast and reliable as writing a headline.
Even though this was a technical project, the motion design thinking behind it was anything but mechanical. Every movement followed an editorial logic. Motion hierarchy that mirrored the rhythm of storytelling, transitions that acted as punctuation, and timing that conveyed the clarity and gravitas of the Times’ brand.
This was motion design as infrastructure: art direction encoded into functionality. It was challenging, deeply rewarding, and proof that even math can be beautiful when it moves right.
So fun, and the entire time it just kept getting better and better. Matt is a world-class designer that teaches me something new on every project. There is a far better case study on the Afternoon, Inc. site so please vist and get a much sleeker and smarter overview…just like Matt himself.
Role:
Video Toolkit Development
