Populate Social are a social media agency based in Cardiff. I caught on to them a couple years back and have been obsessed with their branding and social media presence ever since. Each time I saw one of their social posts I wondered to myself how and what I would contribute to their already established brand. I contacted Dan, their CEO, and he was kind enough to send over a bunch of assets for me to play around with.
After taking a look at the assets I set myself a task to create three separate social posts they could use on their pages: one motion piece, one singular design, and one carousel.
All of the following is speculative - a bunch of conceptual designs I have made, and have not been made or used Populate themselves.
One of my main focuses for the motion piece was to make sure it was clear and straight to the point. It’s no secret that social media users are getting more impatient, spending less time looking at individual posts and will disregard anything that doesn’t immediately grab their attention. Long gone are the days that people would view a ten minute video, and say hello to Tik Tok and Instagram Reels!
I found myself having to prioritise what I considered most important in both the information and my design so that I didn’t end up making a ridiculously long video. This meant that the final version resulted in less imagery than initially intended, but still included a bunch of moving parts and short animated loops throughout.
There are points within the video that I knew I would have to display static imagery for a few seconds at a time because of the pacing of my voiceover. To help keep the viewer stimulated I chose to animate these assets, resulting in a hand-drawn feel, and feeding nicely into Populate’s ethos of having a very hands-on way of combating socials.
It also adds a nice personal touch to the posts, which hopefully would resonate more with viewers. This same reason is why I took this opportunity to draw a couple of their employees, along with a couple of supporting illustrations of objects from photos of their office space.
I also took this opportunity to dabble in another of my creative passions, producing the backing music for the motion piece using Ableton Live.
I thought that the best way to avoid any copyright claims was to make the music myself. I also recorded the voiceover heard in the video and is highlighted in green in the screenshot to the right.
