At Designity, we consider ourselves lucky to be able to work alongside creatives who remind us every day that it’s never too late to follow your dreams.
And Amanda R., one of our community’s newest motion designers, proves just that. Amanda discovered her passion for design and motion graphics by pure chance and she’s never looked back since.
So, if you’re ready to see how Amanda’s leap of faith took her from an HR department of an Individuals and Family Services company to the world of motion design, then we’ve got an inspiring story for you!
Today’s blog is your backstage pass to an exclusive sitdown with motion designer, Amanda, to show you how, sometimes, the path to your dream career is anything but ordinary.
Pull up a chair, because it’s time to meet Amanda!
How did you get into motion graphics design? What’s your origin story?
I used to work in HR, which I kind of fell into accidentally.
And I did not love it. No disparagement meant; I think it's an important job, taking care of benefits and unemployment and all the stuff that HR takes care of.
I worked in a place that required employees to take trainings; some of them were annual, some of them were every six months, or two or three years, depending on what it was. And so one challenge was getting people to keep up their certifications. So, we were like “what's can make these boards eye-catching, where people can go and see when their trainings were coming up?”
This was not a design company either. It was a for-profit company where all their money came from state contracts, so we didn't have any design tools. But I had to make it eye-catching, so I took a World War II-like, Uncle Sam propaganda poster and used MS Paint to make it for trainings. It was the goofiest thing, but it actually came out looking legit.
And that was the most fun that I’d had at work, ever. In the last 10 years that I'd been doing this, I actually had a good time. That was a revelation; it was like, “Whoa, you can have fun at work?! That's crazy!”
So, that was February of 2012. By June, I had looked into different kinds of programs and I decided that I really wanted to try motion. So, I found a program for motion graphics and VFX and by June or July, I was enrolled and going to school and I never looked back.
Was that your first foray into design or had you always had an interest in art and designing?
I had taken art classes.
I'd always enjoyed drawing. I took art in different summer programs and in high school. I didn't so much the first time I went to college — I did art sort of, as a hobby more than anything else; a lot of sketching and drawing. I like to look at photographs and try to mimic a photorealistic style from pencil to paper.
But I had never considered it an option because it's such a difficult creative pursuit. You gotta fight a little bit harder, and every company's got an HR department, right? So, that was an easy job to fall into.
Where did you take your motion design classes?
It was probably the worst for-profit situation, but it was just, “Hey, this is what I can find and manage and do,” so I was cool.
And I think I was actually pretty lucky in where I was and who was there at the time. The instructors were actually professionals in their field, and some were actually really good.
Yeah, it was actually a really good experience. I know it can be a real hit or miss but there were some good mentors. I was like, “Hey, I'd like to learn how to make animated comics because that looks awesome,” and the head of the department said if I found her X amount of other people who want to take that class too, she’d get it on the registrar.
And so, I found enough people to meet it, and they found an instructor for it and then that class ended up filling up past capacity. It just felt like I was there with the right people.
How did your career lead you to Designity?
At my school, they had a pretty good system for after you were done.
There was a class to help make a resume, build a website, and design business cards and some kind of giveaway to have for recruiters at the Senior show held at the end of every quarter. Then for like six months to a year, their career center would continue to send job emails and help reach out and find you work, because the goal was to actually get you working.
So, I graduated in December and in February, I had an internship with a company called Sticky, and then did that through April, and then they extended my internship through June. Then, with the help of the career center — they were sending me jobs constantly and other opportunities — and one of those landed me a job in July of 2015 and I had that job for the next nine years.
It was a company called Guidespark and they made instructional videos for benefits, like companies explaining open enrollment or 401k plans; mostly benefits and financial planning.
Then they got purchased by a company called TIVIAN back in 2021 and they kept me on. Eventually, I was the last motion designer standing basically. They had a concept; it was not a bad concept. They were a company that made surveys, so getting feedback for companies from their employees.
And so, they bought Guidespark, thinking they could have the full cycle of being able to distribute information from the employer back to the employee since we made informational videos and documents and stuff like that. But they didn’t have a good concept of how to integrate our platform with theirs. It could have worked, but unfortunately, their CEO passed away and they were dealing with industry changes after COVID, so the studio department slowly whittled away as they attempted to balance some unfortunate business strategies.
Anyway, business went poorly, and they ended up shutting down the studio completely and letting everybody, all the writers and designers, go.
So, I was throwing spaghetti at the wall, and I saw Designity on LinkedIn and I applied and got a contact saying, “Hey, we'd love to get you in!” and it worked out.
What has been your Designity experience so far?
It's a little bit of a challenge to ramp up. Especially as a motion designer, there aren't a lot of Emerging jobs.
I think also a lot of motion designers are at the Senior and Pro levels, so that's where I think most of the work comes in. So, I just wait until someone reaches out.
Fortunately, Kensie was in the interview process, and they’d seen my work as part of the interview and already had an idea of some things coming up and one of those is what I'm working on now.
So, hopefully, that's a good sign.
How has Designity been different from your experience at your other motion graphics job?
It's different in the sense that you're only working on projects as they become available.
I think if I were a copywriter, I would be getting a lot more opportunities, but since I've seen a few other motion designers get hired after me, that seems like a sign that the goal is to add a wider spectrum of opportunities.
So, I like the goal of an on-demand studio of creatives that are available to take on whatever kind of work comes in, as it comes in. I think that's a good approach that I've not really seen versus what I’ve worked for. I can pick up whatever I want; my schedule is very free-form, so if I don't have anything going on, I can help out with family stuff or run errands or whatever I need to do.
There's a lot of flexibility in it, which I wouldn't have in a 9–5 kind of a situation.
What is your favorite thing about working at Designity?
The flexibility is nice; I've been appreciating it a lot.
And I think it's really difficult in a fully remote situation to sort of keep people connected. The place I worked at before, the people were really close; it was a really close-knit studio. Not necessarily with the rest of the company, but the internal studio all worked together really well.
But that became really, really difficult when things went remote during COVID, to maintain that kind of connectivity. I think if we hadn't been close beforehand, it would have been way worse.
So, I really appreciate the ways that Designity tries to keep people connected in an intentionally fully remote environment. There's a lot of thought that has to go into that, like what Alycia does with the Innovation Labs sessions that can kind of keep people in that space and learning from each other and having these experts in their area showing what they do. It gives people a chance to try that out and learn something from somebody else and see what people come up with.
I think it’s really valuable having that kind of “town hall” space to get together as creatives and talk about how things are.
I’m not sure I’ve seen that successful way of building a community in a remote environment at other companies.
What is your favorite kind of project to take on?
I enjoy character work when I get the chance for it.
It's more rare because it takes longer — designing characters and rigging characters and the sort of nuance of animating characters. But when I do get the opportunity for it, that is a good time.
If you were to ask me if I could just pick my dream project and work on that — this is gonna sound goofy, but I play D&D (Dungeons & Dragons) with my friends, and my ideal project would be turning our D&D campaigns into animated comics!
What is the most challenging kind of project for you?
I would say probably kinetic type.
I've seen it done very successfully, but I feel like making kinetic type look good and dynamic is not something that necessarily comes naturally to me. It's like I have to work for it.
There's a difference between having the text kind of move around and shift and land and have really nice layouts that look good and feel good and make sense and give the viewer enough time to take it in without sitting on something too long. I feel like that's easier to do with visuals but trying to make a whole video out of just text, I find that challenging.
But, if that’s what a client wants, you just power through it because if that's what you got to do, that's what you got to do!
How do you keep yourself up to date with motion design tools?
Some of it I dive into because I get curious about it.
I kind of started to get curious about interactivity and looking into Rive and Womp just to see what that was about; stuff like that, something that catches my eye.
Just seeing a new tool that's like, “my God, this is super simple.” Like pretty much anybody could jump in and start using Womp and make something kind of like fun and cute.
So, I just start just doing tutorials and looking for different little online classes. Most of them are free. My YouTube algorithm also hands me a lot of videos at this point. I guess I look at that stuff all the time.
What do you like to do when you’re not working?
D&D is probably a big one.
My friends and I also play a different game called Cypher, which it's still a role-playing game that you play with dice, but you roll a lot less and the focus is more story-forward and more character-forward.
So, I do that, and I have sort of basic hobbies too. I watch some YouTube, some of it for work, some of it for purposes of diving down a rabbit hole, some of it just for fun.
I watch shows; I'm watching Agatha All Along right now. I'm in a book club, so we read a book a month.
<div class="c-blog_comp-cta cc-component-2"><div class="c-blog_comp-cta-left"><div class="c-blog_comp-cta-left-wrap"><img src="https://global-uploads.webflow.com/61cdf3c5e0b8155f19e0105b/63695243d096983691046ac3_Potential-Creative.png" loading="lazy" alt="" class="c-blog_comp-cta-left-img"></div></div><div class="c-blog_comp-cta-right cc-dark"><div class="c-blog_comp-content"><div class="c-text-wrapper cc-mb-32"><div class="c-title-4 cc-bold"><strong>Like to work as a freelancer with consistent income?</strong></div></div><div class="c-text-wrapper"><div class="c-text-2">Designity's collaborative model is designed to give you all of the perks of being a freelancer without the income instability.<br></div></div></div><div class="c-blog_comp-wrapper"><a href="http://designity.com/creatives" target="_blank" class="c-button w-button"><strong>Join Our Creative Community</strong></a></div></div></div>
Do you have any words of inspiration for aspiring creatives, especially as someone who got into design later in life?
It's never too late, right?
I think it's really easy to get stuck in a mindset of “This is my life now,” but I've met a lot of people along the way who didn't really follow that mold.
So, after college the first time around where I got a psych degree, I just moved to Ireland for almost a year. Me and a friend of mine from college — we both have Irish heritage, and I've always wanted to hang out there, so we just moved to Ireland.
I’ve always thought that if there's something that you really want, just go for it. That doesn’t mean it's not gonna not be a challenge. When we moved to Ireland, we saved up for two years, just squirreling away little acorns of what we could, working mundane basic-ass jobs.
Just find a way to make it happen until you can do the thing you want to do.
Don't feel like you're stuck in whatever you're doing. If you're miserable at a thing or you want to learn a thing or you've always wanted to live in some other country, visit Asia or Africa, or South America?
Good. Go. Do it.
There's a way to do it, whatever it is. There's always a way to figure it out.
It might take longer than you would like it to in order to get there but it's possible. Don't just tell yourself I can't because XYZ, tell yourself, “Here are my challenges. How do I work within those challenges to make it happen?”
