How to avoid that 2015 look in your 2025 animated video
A lot of briefs talk about wanting a “clean and contemporary style”. But the style references? They’re often anything but. It’s not unusual to see examples like whiteboard explainer videos or bubbly cartoon characters that look straight out of early YouTube days.
To help bridge that gap between what clients ask for and what actually looks current, here are three tips that’ll help you land a visual style that feels fresh, relevant and creatively sharp for 2025.
Tip 1: Colour isn’t just branding: it’s atmosphere
Most brand guidelines treat colour as a static thing: pick a few swatches, apply them to everything and call it a day. But motion design opens up more creative possibilities. You can treat colour like lighting. You can shift tones and saturations to convey mood, pacing or energy. You can use gradients to add warmth or dimension.
Staying on-brand doesn’t have to mean staying inside the box. A skilled designer can expand a palette in subtle ways that still feel aligned with the brand. But it’s important that the marketing team is involved to sign off on the direction, especially when you’re stretching outside the official colour specs.
If you’re after something distinctive, try thinking about how colour can behave, not just appear.
Tip 2: Don’t take style cues from stock
Stock illustration styles have their place: usually on placeholder slides. But if you want your video to feel original, avoid anything that looks like it came from a generic asset library.
The safest way to keep things fresh is to pull references from creative portfolios, not stock sites. Behance, Dribbble and Pinterest are your friends here. Even better, describe the feel you’re after, not just the look. Maybe it’s “calm but curious” or “bold but human”. That gives your creative team the room to design something unique and unexpected.
Here’s a curveball idea: reference an art movement or film style instead of another explainer. Imagine a fintech video inspired by Bauhaus. Or a healthcare animation with the colour treatment of a Wes Anderson film. That’s the kind of thinking that sticks.
Tip 3: Think about movement early, not just visuals
It’s easy to focus on what your video will look like: colours, characters, icons, layout. But in animation, movement is just as important. How things move on screen changes how your message feels.
Is the story flowing smoothly or jumping from idea to idea? Does the pace feel calm and confident or fast and energetic? Are key points landing with weight or flying by too quickly? These are all things that motion design helps define.
The best results happen when movement is considered from the start, not added on at the end. So when you’re briefing a project, don’t just talk about how it should look. Talk about how it should feel. That kind of direction gives your creative team room to use motion in thoughtful, meaningful ways, not just as decoration.
And if you want to push the boundaries a bit, here’s an idea: skip traditional transitions altogether. Ask your team to explore storytelling through one continuous sequence, where the camera moves through the story like a single shot. Or possibly, in a similar way, aim for a fixed-plane approach, where the view never changes but everything around it evolves over time. Both are modern, polished techniques that create an immersive feel and feel right at home in 2025.
To find out more about what we can do to help you, for both 2D and 3D videos, get in touch via the form on our contact page, or give us a call.