How Motto builds brand systems that move with Jitter
Motto is a strategic branding agency that works with innovation-led companies to build brands that shape their categories and culture. For more than 20 years, they’ve been creating brand systems designed to perform across an ever-expanding range of digital environments.
With a global team of around 45 people spanning strategy, design, verbal, creative, technology, client experience, and operations, Motto already has a sophisticated motion practice. Jitter has become another part of that toolkit, helping the team explore motion quickly and turn considered motion systems into repeatable applications that can live beyond the agency.
Around 25 people at Motto now use Jitter, particularly across their Brand Lab and client creative teams, on work that spans animated typography, logos and brand marks, graphic behaviors, social content, presentations, case studies, website moments, and launch assets.
Building motion systems that can actually live
For Motto, creating a great motion language is only part of the job. The bigger challenge is designing one that clients can continue to use after the brand leaves the agency's hands.
Some applications demand highly considered work from specialist motion designers using tools like After Effects and Cavalry. But many of Motto's clients have smaller in-house creative teams or no dedicated motion expertise at all. That creates an important design constraint: the system needs to be creatively ambitious, but practical enough for the people inheriting it to use every day.
“We can create an incredibly sophisticated motion system, but part of good brand design is considering whether the client can actually use and sustain what we've built.”
Instead of seeing Jitter as a replacement for the specialist tools already in their workflow, Motto uses it as a complementary layer. Their motion designers can establish more sophisticated principles and behaviors in After Effects, Cavalry, or other tools, while Jitter helps translate parts of that thinking into repeatable applications and templates.
“A brand system creates immense value if people can keep bringing it to life.”
Exploring how a brand behaves
Jitter also gives Motto a fast way to bring motion into the process earlier. Seeing an identity move can reveal qualities that are impossible to evaluate in a static composition. Rhythm, pace, tension, energy, transition, and behavior all become another dimension through which the team can test an idea.
Instead of defining the entire visual system first and thinking about animation later, designers can quickly explore how an identity behaves while the creative direction is still taking shape.
That speed makes Jitter particularly useful for prototyping. The team can quickly test a motion idea, understand whether it belongs in the identity, and keep exploring before committing to a more production-heavy execution.
“For clients, Jitter has reduced the distance between imagining how a brand should behave and actually being able to see that behavior in motion.”
From motion language to repeatable brand behavior
Once that language has been established, the challenge shifts from exploration to consistency. A modern brand might need to show up across dozens or hundreds of pieces of content, often created by different people and teams. Recreating the motion from scratch every time makes it difficult to maintain the same rhythm and behavior across all of those touchpoints.
With Jitter, Motto can turn parts of a motion system into reusable templates and behaviors. Instead of handing clients a static set of guidelines describing how something should move, the team can give them working applications they can adapt themselves.
This is especially useful for clients without dedicated motion designers, giving their in-house teams a more approachable way to produce new content while staying within the creative system Motto originally designed.
“Jitter gives us another option. We can establish a strong motion language and translate certain parts of it into templates and behaviors that client teams can work with themselves.”
Bringing the Future of Brand 2026 to life
A recent example is Motto's Future of Brand 2026 Report, their annual study examining the forces reshaping brands, business, technology, and culture. The report itself is a substantial editorial experience, but launching it meant extending its visual language into an entire ecosystem of content across social and digital channels.
Motto used Jitter for a selection of social pieces, creating animated assets that translated the report's visual identity into motion.
Rather than approaching every launch asset as an individual animation exercise, the team could establish a coherent set of behaviors first and then use those principles across a wider family of content. That made it easier to create variations efficiently while keeping each piece connected to the same underlying idea.
“Great brand systems need both creative distinction and the ability to scale.”
The results
Jitter has added another level of versatility to Motto's motion practice. The team can use specialist tools when the idea calls for deeper motion craft, while reaching for Jitter when they need to explore an idea quickly, extend an established system, or make it easier for clients to carry that system forward.
Motion becomes part of the design process
By making ideas faster to prototype, Jitter helps Motto think about movement earlier. Instead of waiting until an identity is fully resolved, the team can use motion itself to evaluate rhythm, energy, personality, and behavior as the brand is being built.
Sophisticated systems become easier to scale
Once the creative principles are established, reusable behaviors and templates make it easier to extend the same motion language across social, presentations, websites, launches, and other brand touchpoints without treating every asset as a new animation project.
Clients can keep the brand moving
Most importantly, the system doesn't stop working once it leaves Motto's hands. Jitter gives client teams a more accessible way to keep creating motion themselves while preserving the thinking and creative intent behind the original identity.
“Jitter gives teams a fast, intuitive way to explore, prototype, and scale motion as part of a broader brand system.”
For Motto, that's ultimately what a successful brand system should do: not just look distinctive when it launches, but give the people using it the tools to keep bringing it to life.
Motto is a strategic branding agency that works with innovation-led companies to build brands that shape their categories and culture.
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