About the project: This motion graphic mock project was made for a fictional record label called Drop-D Records. Named after "Drop D" guitar tuning, a tuning commonly used in hard rock and metal music, Drop-D Records primarily signs bands from these genres. This logo stinger would be primarily used as a branding tool to introduce or end music videos for the bands signed under them, a tactic used by real-life record labels in the same market, such as Napalm Records and Relapse Records. 

Logo design: The centerpiece for this animation is the logo. To help tie the logo to the product, and to better attune to the target market of the record label, I took inspiration from classic metal and hard rock design aesthetics for the logo design. Classic metal design aesthetics tend to use various shades of black, red, and grey. So, red and black were a natural choice for logo colors. Another less obvious characteristic of this design language is the extensive use of blackletter, and blackletter-esque typefaces. Classic examples of this include the logos for the bands Dio and Motörhead. As a final piece of inspiration to keep the logo from looking to much like other logos in this sub-culture, I took some inspiration from their music equipment. The black line connecting "Drop-D" and "Records" is meant to mimic the cable that connects a guitar to an amp and helps keep the logo visually balanced. 

Animation design: I began designing the animation by creating a mental storyboard. This helped determine what I was going to need to make for the animation. After creating my assets in Adobe Illustrator, I imported them into Adobe Animate. Next, I created an initial draft of the animation and added in my sound effects. Finally, I made some minor adjustments to create the final animation.

What I learned: Surprisingly, the most challenging aspect of this project was not the animation. It was making the logo. When I was a kid, I had a phase when I was really interested in animation, so I was already fairly familiar with Adobe Animate, as well as some of the basic principles of animation. Other than some minor adjustments to some smear frames (an animation technique used to create the appearance of motion blur) there wasn't that much that was tricky about the animation process. On the other hand, the logo had quite a few issues that I needed to fix. The original draft of the logo was difficult to balance, and I had some trouble managing its visual flow. Integrating the "guitar cable" into the logo was difficult, requiring many reworks to get a visually balanced and cohesive logo. Another factor that made designing the logo difficult was the word "Drop D."  For the first draft, I had spelt "Drop-D" as "Drop D." While "Drop D" is the correct way to spell it, the single capital "D" felt isolated from the rest of the logo, so the hyphen was added. This also required many different reworks of the logo to get right.