Made to move: Andrew Vucko

For motion designer Andrew Vucko, movement is part of our core identity – on a par with how we speak or what we wear. The same goes for brands. How a brand moves – and why it does so – isn’t an extra layer, or a final flourish, but something foundational that shapes how a brand is understood before a single word is read. 

A message can really land very differently… depending how something or someone moves.

“Motion really felt like a natural extension of communication,” he says, tracing the idea back to his days studying communication at university, and early experiments with After Effects 7 in his parents’ basement. “What really pulled me in was the idea that motion could function like a body language. How a message can land very differently, depending how something or someone moves, how they enter a room, how they speak with their hands.”

It’s a comparison that has stayed with him, and now underpins the work of Vucko, the Toronto-based boutique motion agency he founded in 2015. Body language, as Vucko sees it, isn’t purely decorative; it carries intent and shapes perception. “A message can really land very differently… depending how something or someone moves,” he says.

Above: Spotify’s annual campaign reflects both users’ listening habits and current cultural touchpoints.

That belief was shaped by a non-linear career journey through film, editing, visual effects and communications, each discipline contributing to a broader understanding of how information moves. Motion became the point where everything connected for Vucko: “It became less about technique and more about intent.”

As digital touchpoints have multiplied in our screen-centric world, brands have found themselves producing motion at scale.

That distinction now defines his agency’s approach to working with global brands like Google, Spotify and Intuit. Rather than focusing on individual outputs, the studio builds motion systems – frameworks that define how a brand behaves across contexts. “We approach motion signatures as a set of behaviours rather than a set of outputs,” he explains. “Behaviours define how a brand acts, not just how it looks, and it’s a reflection inherently of a brand’s personality, its tone, its point of view.”

It’s an approach born out of necessity. As digital touchpoints have multiplied in our screen-centric world, brands have found themselves producing motion at scale, often without a unifying structure. The result is fragmentation: work that functions in isolation, but lacks cohesion over time. Most brands don’t have a motion problem, Vucko reckons: they have a support problem. Without a system, teams are left to solve the same challenges repeatedly. With one, they can move faster, more confidently, and with greater consistency.

Above: The tick motif in the TurboTax motion graphics conjurs the emotional satisfaction of ticking something off a to-do list.

That consistency becomes particularly important in long-term, evolving projects like Spotify Wrapped. Wrapped, Spotify’s annual campaign visualising user listening habits, operates as both a product feature and an eagerly anticipated cultural moment. Each year’s iteration must respond to the present – reflecting shifts in music, internet culture and social behaviour, while remaining recognisable. “That cadence creates a natural pressure to always be evolving,” Vucko says. “It becomes more of a response to a moment rather than a formula that repeats.”

Now seven years in, the brief from Spotify’s in-house creative team remains “to explore, push and be unexpected – not just visually, but how the motion behaves, how it captures the energy of that year, and what keeps it from setting into something that's predictable,” he explains.

Elsewhere, in work for software giant Intuit, the challenge is less about cultural responsiveness and more about emotional clarity. “Categories such as finance or fintech don’t lack emotion,” Vucko says. “They just often communicate it in a really functional way.”

The goal isn’t always to be louder… It’s to be more coherent.

In developing a motion identity for Intuit’s DIY tax software, TurboTax, the team wanted everything to be driven by a feeling, and started with the emotions evoked by the TurboTax icon: a simple tick. “Checking something off your list is a moment of surprise, delight and satisfaction,” says Vucko. That small, satisfying action became the foundation for a wider brand ecosystem rooted in feeling, not aesthetics – as well as a reminder that motion doesn’t need to be complex to be effective.

Scale introduces another layer of challenges for motion design, particularly in environments like NRF [National Retail Federation] 2026, where the agency developed a multi-screen experience for three Google brands.

Above: Vucko’s collaboration with Google Cloud’s Next conference included a range of kinetic designs across many iterations, from social to the Las Vegas Sphere.

As the world’s largest annual retail expo, the NRF is a dense, high-traffic event, designed to overwhelm – and while most motion designers’ instincts might be to compete for attention, Vucko took a different approach. “The goal isn’t always to be louder,” he says. “It’s to be more coherent.”

Bringing together Google’s core brand alongside Google Cloud and Gemini required a shared motion logic, what Vucko calls a “Goldilocks zone”, where each brand could express itself without conflict. Motion became the “connective tissue”, aligning behaviours across screens and formats, ensuring the experience felt unified rather than fragmented.

That logic “came from a deep understanding and long-term partnership with Google over the years,” he says. “It’s not about designing for a single moment in time - it’s more about shaping systems that can hold across an entire ecosystem, no matter where they show up.” That could cover anything from airport wayfinding to social media to large scale formats like the Las Vegas sphere.

Where something accelerates, where it pauses… those decisions carry a lot of weight.

This idea of motion as behaviour and connective logic isn’t just intellectual noodling - it’s borne out by the Motion Identity DNA Test, a recent survey carried out by the agency where participants were asked to identify brands using motion alone, with all logos and static visual cues removed.

While Disney’s arc and trail of light was recognised by around 80% of people, the likes of Netflix and Uber proved much less distinctive without context. Across the board, three elements shaped consumer recognition: consistency, distinctiveness and timing. “Where something accelerates, where it pauses… those decisions carry a lot of weight,” Vucko says. Strip everything else away, and motion either holds, or it doesn’t. For Vucko, that’s the point: motion isn’t just a layer applied at the end of a process - increasingly, it defines how a brand exists over time and what allows it to endure.