For a stretch of the 2010s, every company in America decided at the same time that it needed a ninety-second animated video. It's hard to overstate now: the explainer wasn't a format, it was a craze, and an entire industry materialized almost overnight to feed it.
I spent those years working through Visual.ly, the platform at the center of the boom. It had made its name on infographics and data visualization, and its motion arm was where that energy went when the internet decided pictures should move. A producer there matched artists with clients, and the clients were serious ones: Oracle, Prudential, Citizens Bank, big companies with genuinely complicated things to explain.
That was the niche I settled into, and it turned out to be the instructive end of the craze. Anyone can make a skateboard look good on camera. Try an enterprise database. Try a retirement product. The flashy startup explainers got the attention, but the harder and better education was in the unglamorous work: taking something abstract, regulated, and deeply unsexy, and building the visual argument that makes it click. Motion graphics is the only medium that really does this well, which is why the niche existed at all, and why it outlived the craze that created it. Explaining complicated things with motion became the through-line of my whole practice, and a lot of it was learned here, at volume.
The arrangement ran on a very good relationship with one producer, and it ran for years, until it ended the way platform-era arrangements end: Visual.ly got sold, then absorbed, and the whole ecosystem around it quietly dissolved. No falling out, no last project. Just a platform that stopped existing out from under a relationship that worked.
I took two things from that. The craft, which never stopped paying. And a lesson I've been acting on ever since: platforms get sold. Skills and relationships are the only infrastructure you actually own.
A longer essay version of this case study is in progress.