Thinkful

Context

Design a new suite of motion design tools and guidelines for Thinkful, a career accelerator that trains, mentors, and finances people’s career changes into the world of tech.

Strategy

Bring the company’s visual identity to life with an animation style inspired by its bold, yet minimal aesthetic and mission to “build the world’s next workforce” online.

Solution

A fresh motion language imbued with the feeling of building, velocity, and passion forefronts the brand’s personality while setting clear animation guidelines across teams and platforms.

Creative Context

The world of work has changed. Shouldn’t workforces change too?

Thinkful is a groundbreaking career accelerator with an incredible business model –– where you pay nothing until you’re hired and get your tuition back if you don’t get a job in tech. Collaborating with Thinkful’s instructional design team, we developed a motion identity for the company that helps express who they are and what they stand for.

Inspired by the brand’s strategy, we developed a suite of engaging, dynamic motion design tools for their video lessons that will aid students through their courses, foster empathy, accessibility, and dedication whenever, wherever.

Motion Language

We used Thinkful’s brand strategy as a creative and through-line for every asset.

In order to reflect Thinkful’s mission to “build the world’s next workforce,” we needed to create a complementary motion language that would convey the brand’s passionate, optimistic, hardworking personality. Using acceleration as a conceptual starting point, we designed a collection of styles that stack, scale, and transition to what’s next while emphasizing the velocity and acceleration at the heart of their offering.

By reducing information and motion to their most essential elements, we were able to design and animate with finesse, focusing on legibility and consistency with curated bursts of color. Additionally, handwritten assets mimic common note-taking styles in a way that feels honest, intelligent, and human.

Guides + Toolkits

Everything we created kept Thinkful’s production partners, instructional design teams, and training experts in mind.

In order to guide Thinkful’s teams as they instruct designers and external experts, we also developed a comprehensive style guide to create a clear overview of strategy, elements, how-to’s, and dos and don’ts. A complete motion toolkit further helps streamline the brand’s motion identity, standardizing everything from title cards to course overviews, lower thirds, infographics, definitions, and more. The result is a system that moves, scales, and makes connections with maximum ease and clarity.