Scope
Brand
Content
About
General Motors needed motion to behave consistently across a brand that reaches from vehicle interfaces to broadcast. Many teams were producing work to their own standards, and the result read as several brands moving at once.
Motion
We defined the brand's movement as a small set of behaviours rather than a library of animations. Behaviours can be applied to things nobody has designed yet, which is the only way a standard survives contact with a company this size.
System
Each behaviour has a duration, an easing and a rule for when it is used, and the naming maps onto what a person is doing rather than what the element is, so the same vocabulary works in a car and in a commercial.
Application
We rebuilt reference cases across the range: an interface transition, a logo resolve, a product reveal. Seeing the same rules produce all three is what convinced teams the standard was theirs rather than an imposition.
Craft
The standard is written to be handed over. Every behaviour ships with the values, the reasoning and a counter-example, so a team can tell whether they are inside the system without asking.
End
GM came away with motion that reads as one company across every screen it owns.
Credits