Your mark, animated from the vectors it was drawn in.

An animated logo is the two to four seconds that opens a video, closes an ad, holds an app splash screen or bumpers a reel. Built properly it comes from the original artwork. Built cheaply it is a traced screenshot, and the edges tell on it immediately.

Motion is a construction question.

Logo animation takes the finished mark apart along the lines it was genuinely built on — the shapes, the strokes, the counters, the lockup — and gives each piece a job in time. Nothing is traced and nothing is rasterised on the way in, which is what keeps the output clean whether it plays at 240 pixels in a story or across a conference screen behind you.

The reason to bother is attention. Motion is the one thing on a timeline a viewer cannot skim past, and a two-second sting that resolves into your mark is the difference between a video that belongs to your brand and a video that merely mentions it. It is also the cheapest way to make an established identity feel current without touching the logo itself.

The reason most logo animations look cheap is that the motion was designed before the logo was understood. A mark whose whole idea is two shapes locking together should resolve by locking together. If the animation would work just as well with somebody else's logo dropped into it, it is a template with your artwork in it, and it is doing nothing for you that a still image would not.

What you receive

One animation, exported for everywhere it has to play.

The format list matters more than most buyers expect, because every destination refuses something. A single MP4 is the most common way an animation ends up unusable in three of the four places it was bought for.

MP4 for anything that sits on a background of its own. A transparent alpha master for editors dropping the sting over their own footage — a flattened file cannot be composited, and that is the request that comes back most often. GIF for the email clients and chat apps that will not autoplay video at all. Lottie or JSON where a developer needs it as vector data in an app or on a page, at a few kilobytes rather than a few megabytes. Logo file formats explained covers the static equivalents.

Start a logo animation project
  • MP4 and MOV master files
  • Transparent alpha version for overlays
  • GIF for email and social
  • Lottie / JSON on request
  • Square, vertical and wide crops

Crops

One animation, three shapes.

A 16:9 master posted into a vertical feed is letterboxed down to a strip about the width of a thumb. The crops are not exports of one file with the sides chopped off — each is re-laid so the mark is the right size in its own frame, and the timing is identical across all three.

Wide, 16:9

Video intros and outros, YouTube, webinars, conference screens and website hero loops. This is the master everything else is cut from.

Square, 1:1

Feed posts, animated profile images, marketplace listings and the ad placements that reject vertical outright.

Vertical, 9:16

Stories, Reels, TikTok and Shorts, where a letterboxed wide crop throws away roughly three quarters of the screen it was given.

The marks underneath

Animation is a downstream discipline.

It can only ever be as good as the artwork it is built from. These are client marks of the kind the reel is cut from — drawn in vector first, with the layers and construction an animator needs already in the file. If we drew the logo, that groundwork is done and the animation costs less.

Vector logo design by Dygram Designs, built in the layers a logo animation is assembled from — client project 1 Vector logo design by Dygram Designs, built in the layers a logo animation is assembled from — client project 2 Vector logo design by Dygram Designs, built in the layers a logo animation is assembled from — client project 3 Vector logo design by Dygram Designs, built in the layers a logo animation is assembled from — client project 4 Vector logo design by Dygram Designs, built in the layers a logo animation is assembled from — client project 5 Vector logo design by Dygram Designs, built in the layers a logo animation is assembled from — client project 6

Where it ends up

It has to sit beside the static work.

An animated logo almost never plays alone. It opens a post that carries the same palette, the same type and the same crop rules as everything around it, which is why the timing is cut to match the kit rather than designed in isolation. These are social kits from the same studio.

Social media kit by Dygram Designs — profile art, cover art and post templates the animated logo is cut to sit inside, sheet 1 Social media kit by Dygram Designs — profile art, cover art and post templates the animated logo is cut to sit inside, sheet 2 Social media kit by Dygram Designs — profile art, cover art and post templates the animated logo is cut to sit inside, sheet 3

Logo animation, in plain numbers.

Built from
Your original vector files
Typical length
Two to five seconds
Master formats
MP4 and MOV
Transparency
Alpha version for overlays
Email and chat
GIF supplied
App and web
Lottie / JSON on request
Crops
Square, vertical and wide
Audio
Silent by default

How it runs

From flat artwork to a finished sting.

Six steps, and the first one is where most animation projects are quietly won or lost.

  1. 01

    We take the logo apart

    The vector file is separated into the layers the motion needs — mark, wordmark, counters, anything that has to move independently. If the artwork arrives as a flattened PNG the project stops here until it is redrawn, because there is nothing to animate.

  2. 02

    Timing before pictures

    The sting is blocked out as pure timing first: when each element arrives, how long it holds, where it settles. Getting that right while everything is still grey boxes is far cheaper than discovering it after a full render.

  3. 03

    Motion drawn from the mark's own logic

    The build follows how the logo was constructed. A lettermark made of two strokes resolves by those two strokes meeting. An emblem resolves from its outer shape inward. This is the step that separates an animation of your logo from a template containing it.

  4. 04

    Internal QA, at real sizes

    Reviewed at the size it will actually play — a story on a phone, not a preview window. Anything that reads at full screen and turns to mush at thumbnail scale goes back, which is the same small-size discipline the logo itself went through.

  5. 05

    Every format rendered together

    Masters, alpha, GIF and all three crops come out of the same pass, so the timing is identical across the set. Re-rendering one format weeks later and eyeballing the match is exactly how a set drifts out of sync.

  6. 06

    Handover, with a note on what goes where

    Files plus a one-page note saying which format belongs on which platform. The single commonest failure after delivery is somebody uploading the alpha master to a platform that flattens transparency to black.

Fit

Who an animated logo is worth it for.

Right for you if anything you publish moves.

You post video, run paid social, present to rooms, stream, or ship an app or site with a loading state. If you are already paying for video production, the sting is the cheapest line on that invoice and the only part of it you will still be using in three years.

Not yet, if the logo itself is not settled.

Your mark is still changing, or nobody can find the vector source. Animation is downstream of the identity: animating a logo you are about to revise is money spent twice, and animating a traced bitmap produces edges that shimmer the moment it scales.

Scope

What a logo animation does not include.

Three things that sound adjacent and are genuinely separate pieces of work.

It is not a video edit.

We deliver the sting, not the film it opens. Dropping it onto your footage takes seconds in any editor, and the transparent alpha version exists precisely so it composites cleanly without a matte.

Music and sound design.

The masters are delivered silent. Social autoplays muted anyway, and an unlicensed sound effect is a takedown waiting to happen. If you have licensed a sting we will cut the animation's timing to it at no extra cost.

Character animation and explainers.

A mascot performing, or a sixty-second explainer with a script, is a different discipline on a different budget. Ask and we will scope it separately rather than stretch a logo animation until it breaks.

Questions

The ones people actually ask.

How long should a logo animation be?

Two to five seconds for a sting. Beyond that it stops being an identity asset and becomes content: people skip it, and on most platforms the skip is counted against the video that carried it. The exception is a website hero loop, which is built to run seamlessly rather than to resolve.

Can you animate a logo you did not design?

Yes, if you own it and can supply the vector source. Without vectors we would be tracing a bitmap, and traced edges shimmer the instant the animation scales or moves. If all you have is a raster file we will quote a redraw first and tell you why.

Will it work as an app splash screen or a website loader?

That is what the Lottie or JSON export is for. It renders as vector at any size, weighs a few kilobytes instead of a few megabytes, and can be triggered and controlled by code — none of which a video file can do.

Does it come with sound?

Not by default. Feeds autoplay muted, so the animation has to work silently or it does not work, and unlicensed audio is a real takedown risk on every major platform. If you have licensed a sound sting, send it and we will cut the timing to match.

What do I need to send you to start?

The vector source of the final logo — AI, EPS or SVG — plus a list of where you already know it has to play. If we designed the logo we have all of it, including the layer structure, which is why an animation ordered after a logo project takes less time.

Can I get it in my brand colours on any background?

The alpha version handles that. It carries real transparency rather than a white box, so the same file drops onto dark footage, a coloured slide or a photograph without a visible rectangle behind it.

Is animation covered by the copyright transfer?

Yes, on the same terms as everything else. The animation and its source project are assigned to you in writing along with the mark itself. <a href="/blog/who-owns-your-logo/">Who actually owns your logo</a> explains why assignment and licence are not the same thing.

Also from this studio

Give your mark four seconds of movement.

Send the logo and where it has to play. You get questions, a timeline and a quote back — average reply time about an hour, and no charge for the conversation.

Start your project