Digital Science’s ‘Dimensions’ is an analytics and insights database that provides users an infrastructure that empowers them to explore connections between wide ranging research data.

Think it sounds a bit complicated? Well, so did we.

That’s exactly why Digital Science came to us looking for animations that would handily showcase their four new apps; ‘Perspectives & Insights’, ‘Landscape & Discovery’, ‘Reviewer Finder’ and ‘Research Integrity’

As always, we were thrilled to help (and learn a thing or two in the process).

Their new apps conveniently offer visual insights from a range of research communities so that lots of different companies can easily use discoveries made in scientific literature to improve how they work.

Here was the brief…

Keep it TopLine

  • Create 4 x 2D explainer animations to showcase and promote each of the apps.
  • Keep the animations aesthetically crisp, clean and ‘appy’
  • Use Voiceover to narrate the content and explain the information shown

Simple enough, but to properly prepare for the task we decided to take inspiration from Dimensions and do some research of our own to inform our approach.

First, we digested the essence of Dimensions’ brand and filled a document with shape, color and text references to get our design juices flowing.

Then, using the apps themselves, we screenshotted the user journeys along with visuals from webinars on their website to images of the dashboards in action.

Now we were ready…

Designing Dimensions

  • We started by building a style based on Digital Science’s brand assets. Hexagons were key, so we centered the initial designs on these as part of a dynamic background texture.
  • Then, we created simplified versions of graphics that we discovered during the research phase, replacing text and fine details with shapes and lines that would look consistent in a fast-moving animation, and used the Dimension brand colours to stylise them.
  • At 60 seconds long, these animations are pacy and full of information, so it was crucial to strike a balance between speed and smooth, flowing movement from frame to frame.

With the designs finalised and approved by the Dimensions team, all that was left was to approve a voiceover artist and layover audio of the final script onto the videos.

And just like that, four new brilliantly complex applications had four equally brilliant TopLine animations.