Ideas in Motion That Make Your Content Travel

Content has to succeed in the world we're in. A campaign or story is like an iceberg, with all the intelligence in it hidden under a click. It takes great art direction to make readers dive below the surface.

DGFX is known for distilling difficult subjects into a digestible narrative. Our editorial illustration practice is the ultimate expression of that skill: a visual meme, short enough to share, helping readers understand what they're going to get and drawing them into the content.

One vehicle we love is the animated GIF — the timeless artifact of pop communication — because it's fit for purpose. Lead art delivered as a self-contained animation, five seconds max, that plays in the browser and rides along inside the links people text each other.

The philosophy came out of building the first news graphics department at Bloomberg News, where the readers were market makers — high throughput, with no attention to spare. If a graphic couldn't be grokked in three seconds, it was doing too much. Getting there is about reducing and removing visual concepts until the frame contains only what is needed.

Years later the lesson has only become more valuable, with the whole world reduced to five-second clips. It's why art direction has been a core part of what we deliver for Hunterbrook Media, the startup financial news service, as they build their brand.

The idea always comes first, and the good ones carry a nod to something — a Rauschenberg, a Hitchcock poster, Star Wars, the cover of Wish You Were Here — with a little New York Post sensibility: lighthearted, but stating the case of the evidence. The sophisticated reader catches the reference.

From there, the method is whatever executes by the deadline. Some of these get built in code and filmed right off the screen. Others are hand-animated. One was a playable game, recorded while we played it.

Freeform, high-stakes work like this keeps us in shape: ideas fast, execution fast. And round-tabling with a bunch of really smart editors until everybody feels it tells the story is exhilarating.

Examples shown: Hercules Capital, the Federal Reserve, New York metering, CSG, Ensign Group, Hamilton Lane, Himax, Ubiquiti, PBMs, Sammons Financial, StepStone, JinKO Solar, and Sterilization Services of Virginia.