I recently completed a training video for the company FirstHand.   As an intro to this training video, I wanted to help establish the brand by creating a short, catchy animated logo.  I worked in After Effects, preparing some assets in Illustrator, and making a short audio loop in Garage Band.

FirstHand provides a system of hand hygiene for multiple settings, including medical facilities.  They already had some ideas of their branding and an overall feel for the graphics – we wanted to convey a clean, minimal look that implies a healthcare environment.

This was the pre-existing logo that I was given, in a .png format.  My first challenge was to re-create it in a format that I could manipulate in an animation:  I reconstructed the green hand as vector shapes in Illustrator, and found a font that was close enough to this in After Effects.  (on a side note, the font that I ended up using to mimic this one didn’t have a “bold” setting, so I improvised by adding an additional wider stroke to make the letters the right weight)

The key to this animation became the green “fingers”, the color and arched shape of them is reminiscent of a medical monitor (like a pulse reading).  I set up a repeating series of this shape, and animated it with a delay expression in After Effects.  I wanted the colors to have a little more excitement than just one shade, so I also added an expression into the color control so that we have a wave of variation through lighter and darker shades of green before settling on the final color.

Overall, a great design project for me, both the client and I are happy with the results!