Animated Idents for IMEX

Marketing Promos

Client | IMEX
Production | Buff
Sound Design | James Locke-Hart

IMEX Group organises the leading international trade shows for global meetings industry.

The Challenge

During their 2023 rebrand, the marketing team at IMEX approached us to create some engaging animations to help showcase the new branding. The assets were to be used on socials as well as on large scale screens at their global events.

The IMEX team wanted the visuals to be abstract, whilst taking inspiration from the company's four pillars: innovation, sustainability, people and experience. Another key outcome of the project was to ensure these idents created an expressive narrative by making use of the brand geometry. As there would be no voiceover, we had to figure out a way of making the pieces emotive through the use of design, motion and audio. One of our most fun challenges - telling stories with simple shapes!

We kicked off the project by creating a selection of style frames to expand on the brand geometry. We needed to broaden the IMEX design universe for us to keep the animations engaging.

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The Solution

We produced three extended logo animation idents: collaboration (hero), innovation and sustainability. For the hero ident, we chose to focus the narrative on the company ethos: ‘We are all connected”. We created a playful take on ‘herd instinct’, as IMEX’s story is really about the importance of human connection and experiencing things together. The dots are representative of people and we follow them through their collective journey in a vibrant geometric environment.

For the innovation and sustainability idents, we created videos using a similar concept, but focused on adapting the colour palettes, shape and movement to suit each theme. We really loved working with the 2D brand, but we wanted to achieve moments of surprise by shifting into 3D elements. This had the added benefit of giving the animations further depth and interest.

The final stage was to design selection of sound effects and lay these down. We also created a unique audio sting so the animated logo was branded both visually and audibly.

The final deliverables were 1x animated sonic logo and 3x animated logo idents.

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