Bringing Merck's Brand to Life: Crafting Engaging Animations for a Timeless Brand
I had the opportunity to work on a project for Merck a few years ago. Most of the work we do for Merck is for social media. Usually static posts or gifs for Google Media Ad Campaigns. We've had a long standing working relationship with Merck so when a request for some animations was brought to me, I jumped at the chance.
Merck is an interesting company with one of the better brands I've worked with. Their brand is classic. Well established. It has a nice look and feel to it. A great color palette, photography, iconography as well as illustrations. It's one of the few brands I've seen that really leans into illustration and animation. They have some really great content on YouTube, LinkedIn and their website. The illustration style is very fun and playful. I was excited to work on some animations for them.
Crafting Technical Talent Animations for Merck’s LinkedIn Recruitment
The two animations I worked on for them were for LinkedIn. They were looking to fill more technical roles that had been lacking in recent years. My creative director and I sat down with them and discussed what they were looking for. They wanted some thing clean, short, and engaging. We were given access to most of their brand library. Sometimes it's difficult working with clients as a third party vendor because we don't always get everything we need to complete a project. Most of the time we have to make due with what we have and be resourceful when it comes to obtaining and creating assets. With Merck, they were very generous and helpful when it came to building these animations.
Although they have a huge library of illustrations, I didn't have direct access to individual characters to use in the animations. So what I did was find a set of characters online that were very similar to their branded characters. Then I styled each using their brand standards. The end result was a pretty close match and I was able to proceed animating once the characters and the storyboard met approval.
Once again I didn't have a ton of time to work on these animations so I had to be diligent about getting all of my content styled, organized and templated for animation. Once I got into After Effects the project came together rather quickly for both. Some of the tougher scenes I faced were of 3 employees falling from the sky and floating to the ground with parachutes. That was a first. Took a bit to get the feel down for that. Another scene where a character navigates an app on a tablet proved to be challenging and they also wanted a man with a very thick accent to do the voiceover on the second animation which took a lot of work to clean up in Premiere in terms of sound quality and audibility.
Overall, they both turned out fantastic. I was very pleased with the final product and so was the client. Projects like these where you don't have a ton of time kind of put you in a position to make decisions quickly. It's not ideal by any means, but I've never worked anywhere that wasn't like that. It seems like it's the same pretty much everywhere. I feel it only makes you stronger as a designer and instead of looking at it as a disadvantage, it's more to your advantage to think of it a drill to keep you on your toes. Think fast. Come up with solutions to problems quickly and ultimately be able to spot potential issues before they become issues.
Below are the two final approved animations.