Motion graphics vs animation: what the difference actually is

Somebody in a meeting said the word animation, and it landed as a yes without anybody deciding anything. Now a budget is attached to a word that means at least five different jobs.

The cost of getting this wrong is not artistic. It is a first round that comes back beautifully made and completely wrong, and a second round that is really a first round with less time. So the useful question is not which of these is better. It is which one you are asking for.

What is motion graphics, and why animation is the wider word

Motion graphics is design that moves. Type, shapes, colour, charts and icons are composed on a screen and given timing, and the movement carries the message rather than decorating it. An animated infographic is motion graphics. So is a logo resolving at the end of a film, a lower third sliding in with a name, and a number counting upwards while a voice reads it out.

Animation is the technique underneath. A character walking, a hand drawing a line, a camera pushing through a modelled city, a button responding to a thumb: all animation. Character animation is not motion graphics, because nothing is being laid out as a design. It is a performance, drawn frame by frame, and it is judged the way a performance is judged.

Here is the test that settles it. What is moving? If it is type, shape, colour or data, you are looking at motion graphics. If it is a character with intent, or a world with a camera in it, you are looking at animation. Both are animation in the technical sense, which is why the word keeps causing trouble.

Motion design explained in a sentence: it is the job of deciding where everything is and when. Animation is the technique, motion graphics is the usual output, and motion design is the work. Most of what gets commissioned as animation is in fact one of five things.

The five things people mean, and what each one is good at

Almost every request lands in one of these five. They are not rungs on a ladder, with 3D at the top. Each answers a different question, and fails the other four.

Kinetic typography and data

Words and numbers, moved. Kinetic typography sets a sentence so that the emphasis lands on the word that matters and the number is still on screen when the voice has finished saying it. It is the most efficient form in existence for one reason. Everything on screen is the message.

It is good at claims, prices, definitions and the one line you want repeated. It is bad at warmth, and bad at anything that needs to be understood as a system.

Character and narrative animation

A character wants something, fails or succeeds, and the audience feels the change. This is the only form that produces empathy, and the only one that can carry a joke. If your message is about consequence, a person and a decision will do work no diagram can do in the same number of seconds.

It is also the most expensive craft here, and it commits you to a script with a real story shape. A weak story told by an attractive character is worse than a strong sentence set in type, because the audience has spent two minutes waiting for a payoff.

Illustrated explainers

Somewhere between the two above. A narrator explains and the screen shows it: a process, a mechanism, a sequence of steps, drawn rather than set in type. This is the workhorse of 2D animation for business, and it is what people usually picture when they say explainer.

It is good at causality and sequence, and it survives translation easily because much of it is understood without reading. It is bad at brevity, since every step wants a shot, and bad at products that must look exactly like the real thing.

UI and product motion

The interface itself, moving. A flow demonstrated, a notification arriving, a state changing, a pointer doing what a finger would do. Shots are short, they repeat, and much of the composition already exists in your design system.

It is good at making an abstract product feel concrete, and usually the cheapest of the five to produce. It is bad at ambition. A film that shows the product accurately succeeds, and a film that tries to tell a story about the company instead will fail.

3D

Space, material, perspective and light. A camera can move through your product, your building or your process, and the audience understands the geography immediately, which is something 2D imitates badly. It is good at scale and physical credibility.

It is bad at cheap. Everything on screen must exist before it can be photographed, so the model, the surface and the rig are built before a single shot can be timed. The finish is easier to get right than the story.

What each one costs you in effort

Cost here means effort, not money, though the two travel together. The measure that predicts it best is how much has to be invented before anything can move.

Kinetic typography has the shortest path. The words are decided, the typeface exists, and the design work is composition and timing. The effort is front-loaded into one decision no supplier can make for you: the final wording.

UI motion has the second shortest path, and it is shorter still when the product already exists, because the material is a set of screens you can point at. The trap is fidelity. A product film that is almost accurate generates a support ticket for every difference noticed.

Illustrated explainers sit in the middle, and the effort is proportional to the number of steps rather than the running time. Eight steps want eight compositions, whether those eight take sixty seconds or two minutes. This is why cutting a step from the script saves more than cutting ten seconds from the edit.

Character animation and 3D are the expensive ends, for different reasons. Character work spends its effort on performance, so it needs a story with a change in it and a design that can act. 3D spends its effort on construction, so the modelling, materials and lighting exist before the first frame can be judged.

One arithmetic point makes this practical. The cost of a film is driven less by its length than by how many shots are invented from nothing and how many are composed from something you already have. A ninety-second film cut from four existing screens is cheaper than a thirty-second film that needs four new ones.

Which one to ask for, in one sentence

You do not need the vocabulary to brief this well. You need a sentence with six parts, and it takes about a minute to write:

A [length] film for [audience], in which [subject] does [what], told through [technique], in [shapes], wanted by [date].

• Length. It sets how much can be said, and it is the part people are most optimistic about.
• Audience. It decides the tone.
• Subject and what it does. This is the message, and if you cannot write it, no technique will save it.
• Technique. This is the choice this article is about, and now you can name it.
• Shapes. These decide whether the film is composed once or four times, and our note on aspect ratios explains why that is not an export setting.
• Date. It is the only part that tells a supplier whether your request is possible.

Here is a filled-in version. A forty-five second film for new customers, in which our onboarding process takes someone from sign-up to first invoice, told through kinetic type and two animated infographics, in 16:9 and 9:16, wanted by the end of March. That sentence contains a script, a style, a deliverable list and a schedule. It is also short enough to be read out loud in a meeting, which is what makes it survive one.

How to brief each of the five so the first round is not wasted

The first round goes wrong for one reason almost every time: the technique forces a decision nobody made, so the supplier makes it as a guess. Here is the decision to settle for each type first.

• Kinetic typography. Bring the final words, approved and locked, and say whether they are voiced or only on screen.
• Character animation. Decide who the character is, whether they speak, and what they want, because a character without a want is a mascot.
• Illustrated explainer. List the steps in order and mark the one people most often get wrong, then let the film spend its time there.
• UI motion. Say whether the interface is real or cleaned up, and name the exact screens, because this is where accuracy is judged.
• 3D. Say whether the space already exists in a model or has to be invented, since that single answer decides the whole schedule.

The pattern is the same in all five. The technique is not the hard part for you. The decision it forces is the hard part, and you are the only one who has it.

Before you spend anything

You can settle the largest unknown for nothing. Nine's free page reads the colours your own website declares and plays Nine's own films in them, with no account and no card. It makes no film of your own, but look before you write the brief, because knowing whether the look is right is worth having before you argue about technique.

A film of your own is a different object. On a plan, Nine writes it from your words, and before you see it, it is judged against a bar of nine out of ten. What Nine makes is the first kind on the list above: type, shape, colour and data, moving to your words. If your brief needs character animation or 3D, that is a job for a studio with animators.

For scale, the pricing page sets out Nine's monthly plans. The arithmetic is worth doing before you choose, because a monthly plan suits a team with several films to make rather than one. Whoever you buy from, the technique is a brief before it is a price, and the brief is the thing you write.

If you take one thing from this, take the test. Ask what is moving. Type, shape, colour and data mean motion graphics. A character with intent, or a camera inside a world, means animation. Then say it in one sentence: a length, an audience, a subject, a technique, some shapes and a date. Most expensive revision rounds are not caused by bad craft. They are caused by a supplier who was told animation and had to guess the rest. If your brief is still one word, our piece on what an animated explainer is used for will help you find the rest.