Podcast

Unpacking the State of Motion Design in 2025

School of Motion

Join Joey and the gang as we look back at the last year of our industry and try to figure out what the next 365 days and beyond will look like. 🔮

Every year, the team at School of Motion dives deep into the state of the industry with an absurdly long podcast...and 2025 was no exception.

It was a year of seismic shifts, from the all-consuming AI revolution to radical changes in how and where motion design skills are applied. This episode wasn't just a recap; it was a candid, exhilarating, and sometimes terrifying look at the future of our craft. If you're looking for closure on the year that was, and a roadmap for 2026, you've come to the right place. W

e covered everything: the latest software updates, undeniable industry trends, major events, the economy's impact, and how to position yourself for success in the face of unprecedented technological change. What happens when the tools become free and ubiquitous? What becomes the most valuable commodity for a creative professional? The answers are changing fast, and the future is far broader than anyone expected.

The podcast was anchored by School of Motion's founder, Joey Korenman, alongside the brilliant industry veterans Aharon Rabinowitz and EJ Hassenfratz, who brought decades of combined experience to the table. But the conversation reached far beyond the core team, featuring invaluable insights from visionary guests who are actively shaping the industry's next generation.

👨🏻👩🏻 Guest Contributors

John LePore - Co-Founder, Blackbox Infinite
Ivan Witteborg - UX Motion Designer, Google
Justin Cone - Executive Director of Communication, Buck & Residence
Eran Stern - Motion Designer & Educator
Kyle Hamrick - Motion Designer, Editor & Educator
Bekki Leahy - Motion Designer & Illustrator
Greg Stewart - Lead Animator, Bible Project
Joey Judkins - Director & High Torchbearer, We Ride at Dawn
Elijah Sheffield - 3D Artist & Educator
Urban Bradesko - Founder, DoubleJump Academy & Crispy Chicken VFX
Dan Maurer - Co-founder, Cart & Horse
Kris Bargen - Co-founder, Cart & Horse
Erin Sarofsky - Owner & Creative Director, Sarofsky
PJ Richardson - ECD, Director & Co-founder, Laundry
Joel Pilger - Founder, Forum
Hayley Akins - Founder, Motion Hatch
Caleb Ward - Founder, Curious Refuge

⚡️ What We Covered: A Revolution in Motion

The discussions flowed across three interconnected macro-themes, each critical to understanding the modern motion designer’s world:

Redefining the Craft: Motion Design as a Universal Language

The central question of the podcast was simple, yet profound: "What does motion design even mean right now?" Everyone agrees that the term has moved beyond its origins in MoGraph (After Effects and Cinema 4D). It is now a flexible, universal toolbox that can be carried into virtually any industry,from automotive Human-Machine Interface (HMI) design at a company like BMW to deep UX/UI work at Microsoft, specialized sports broadcast graphics, virtual reality, and environmental installations. The traditional "industry" of motion design has exploded into a universal skillset. This expansion means that the career opportunities are no longer confined to traditional studios; they are now embedded within product teams and technology companies globally.

The Toolset Shift: Accessible Power and New Disciplines

2025 was marked by an undeniable change in the available tools. While the traditional Adobe and Maxon software remains foundational, the conversation highlighted the emergence of new and powerful players:

UX/Code-Based Tools: Figma, Rive, Lottie, and more specialized tools like ProtoPie are bringing animation skills directly into the product and web development workflow.

The Free 3D Revolution: The increasing ease of use and incredible power of free software like Blender and Unreal Engine have drastically lowered the financial barrier to entry for high-end 3D and real-time graphics.

Taste is the Secret Weapon: The School of Motion team detailed their major shift with the launch of the All Access subscription model, making their full curriculum, including essential but often-overlooked design classes,available at any time. This move directly addresses the year's core thesis: that as tools become easier, foundational artistic skills become the ultimate differentiator.

AI: What Happens when Everyone is an “Artist”?

The most intense conversation revolved around the influence of Artificial Intelligence. While acknowledging the "fear" and "short-term turbulence" AI has introduced, the consensus was that AI has clarified the single most valuable asset an artist can possess: taste. The ability to generate technically perfect visuals is rapidly becoming commoditized. What AI cannot yet do is curate, refine, and select the choices that give a piece emotional resonance, surreal depth, or a distinct, high-level aesthetic. The podcast positioned the pursuit of "good taste" as the new focus for all ambitious motion designers.

💡 Key Insights for the Modern Motion Designer

The discussion yielded several profound, actionable insights for every creative navigating the shifting sands of 2026 and beyond.

The Transferable Toolbox

The idea that motion design is a "set of tools" rather than a single industry was a recurring theme. The essential skills,the 12 principles of animation, composition, typography, and color theory,are the universal operating system that runs all the new software. As Aharon pointed out, moving from one 3D application to another is often just a matter of figuring out "where are these buttons?" because the concepts are already ingrained.

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This understanding is why the barriers to learning new software are crumbling. For veterans, picking up Blender, Rive, or diving into a new Unreal course is no longer a months-long nightmare; it’s a quick ramp-up because the conceptual framework is already there. This realization should be incredibly liberating: your mastery of timing and visual hierarchy is portable, making you a swiss-army-knife, resilient creative capable of moving from broadcast to product design with relative ease. The longevity of your career will depend less on your depth in a single piece of software and more on your ability to quickly master the next software's interface.

UX/Product Design is the New Broadcast

Ivan Witteborg’s insights from Google emphasized that motion is now firmly entrenched in the product design lifecycle. It’s no longer an afterthought or a "nice looking flashy thing" added at the very end. The modern digital experience,from apps to complex websites,assumes sophisticated motion, interaction, and responsiveness. Motion design is now integrated early on, serving a critical function in the user experience by guiding attention, providing feedback, and enhancing comprehension.

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Tools like Lottie and Rive have been pivotal in this shift, making the production workflow from designer to engineer way more accessible. This has fundamentally moved motion into scope. For motion designers, this represents a massive, non-traditional career path. It requires you to think beyond the finished film or commercial and to consider how motion solves a user’s problem. It’s a move from purely form in motion to motion with a function, demanding strategic thinking that is empathetic to both user needs and engineering constraints. The new power centers of the industry are now the app development teams and tech innovation labs.

Imagination and Cinematic Execution Win High-Level Strategy

John LePore of Black Box Infinite painted a compelling picture of how the motion design mindset is essential for leading technological innovation. As new paradigms emerge,spatial interactions, haptics, next-gen AI interfaces,the people building them need to break free from the "same mold of like making apps and lots of rounded rectangles." They need the imaginative, blue-sky thinking that comes naturally to motion, film, and VFX artists.

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John’s firm emphasizes two layers of strategy: being hyper-empathetic and pragmatic with the engineers who have to build the idea, but also having a cinematic execution that captures the imagination of high-level stakeholders. The ability to use animated prototypes and demonstrations that bring complex strategies to life creates an emotional resonance that purely static documents or spreadsheets cannot achieve. Motion designers are uniquely positioned to serve as imaginative consultants in boardrooms, proving that your skills are not just production-level services but critical strategic assets for product advancement.

Your Artistic Taste is Your Competitive Moat Against AI

Perhaps the most important insight for the current climate is that AI has weaponized taste. AI tools can already generate incredibly high-quality images and video from simple text prompts, making "good enough" technical skills obsolete. What remains scarce is the human element: the judgment, cultural literacy, and trained eye to know what to ask for, how to refine it, and when it is right.

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This realization is why School of Motion saw a huge surge in enrollment for its design classes after the introduction of the All Access subscription. The students are now self-selecting the "tough medicine" because they understand that technical proficiency is the floor, and good taste is the ceiling. As Joey noted when discussing the Severance Season 2 title sequence and the Buck Coinbase ad: the magic is in the subtlety, the surrealism, and the counter-intuitive choices that a human, guided by a sophisticated aesthetic, makes. That high-water mark of creativity is the artist's competitive moat against the encroaching tide of automation.

Real-World Validation: Feature Films on an Indie Budget

The honorable mention for Seth Worley’s feature film, Sketch, resonated with the industry's emotional core. Shot on a meager budget of around $5 million, the film achieved the visual quality of a $200 million blockbuster by relying heavily on the tools and hacking creativity of motion designers (After Effects, Cinema 4D). Flow, the Best Animated Feature winner at this year’s Oscars, was created 100% in Blender. These stories are a massive validation that the motion design toolkit, the tools you use every day, are capable of world-class, theatrical-release visual effects. It provides a huge boost to the community's confidence, proving that the only ceiling on your career potential is the depth of your skills and the limits of your imagination, not the cost of your software.

Ready to Navigate the New Normal?

The changes of 2025 were massive, but the future for motion designers is broader and more exciting than ever before. If you want to hear the full, in-depth discussion on these topics, including the incredible deep dive into the featured work of the year, all the upcoming School of Motion courses, and the full breakdown of the AI turbulence, then you need to listen to the entire episode.

📝 Show Notes

Traditional Tools & Tech

AI Tools & Tech

Work & Artists

Other Stuff

The All-Access discount is SOLD OUT, but you can still get 25% off all individual courses! We’ve been quietly rolling out our new All-Access program, where you can get every course we make for one low price. It’s a crazy good deal even without this sale. But until Wednesday 12/4, you can get it for 25% off. For this sale we are opening up 100 spots. After those sell out, you’ll have to wait at least a few months until we open more. Don’t sleep on this deal. We expect it to sell out fast.

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