What Are Style Frames?

After the mood board stage, it’s time to move into style frames, which essentially are a more built-out version of mood boards. Mood boards generally just scratch the surface of what your animation is going to look like while style frames are where you actually start designing your animation elements.

Style frames allow a designer to focus on the client’s design expectations. To ensure we are aligned with the client’s vision, we create and present various options for the client to visualize. We create these options by addressing these big questions:

• Who is the target audience?

• How “abstract” or “literal” can this animation be?

• What is the visual concept? What is a unique storytelling approach that will make it stand out?

• How colorful should it be? How colorful is the narrative/idea/brand? How can the colors represent the intended mood/emotions of the video/product/site/game?

• Is it a minimalistic design or very detailed design?

• How much typography is involved? Is there any?

• What should the typography look like?

• Is the design smooth and flat, or edgy and textured?

• Is there a character? Are they a human, animal, or other?

• How far can we push the design and brand? How strict are the rules?

• What are the key features of the brand that must be represented?

• Is it 2D or 3D? Is it stop motion or set building? Do we have the resources available?

• What plugins or technologies can we use to make this exciting?

By creating options that preemptively answer these questions, it gives the designer/team/makers/client a chance to further visualize what they want the animation to look like and confirm if the video is heading in the right direction.

Before moving onto the next step, an agency also takes into consideration:

• Client’s full production level expectations.

• Be up to date on brand compliance.

• What the scenery, characters, backgrounds, color palette, typography, visual concept, and animation style are going to look like.

• Know which technologies and strategies need to be in place for this style to work.

• Know which designers and animators need to be involved.