Client
Financial Times
Service
End-to-End Motion Design, UI Stylisation & Animation
What we provided
5-Part Explainer & Onboarding Animation Suite
FT Pro - Onboarding animations
FT Pro is built for professionals who require deep market intelligence, specialized analysis, and real-time reporting. To maximize engagement from day one, FT Pro required a suite of motion assets integrated directly into their new subscriber onboarding experience.
Working directly with the Marketing Manager, I delivered an end-to-end series of five focused animations guiding new users through the platform’s core workflows: navigating curated Newsletters, discovering Podcasts, customizing team and personal Workspaces, and Downloading the FT App.
Download the App
Workspace
Discover our journalists
Explore Newsletters
Explore Podcasts
Product interfaces are inherently dense, especially on financial intelligence platforms where screens are packed with live data, deep navigation menus, and editorial feeds. Standard screen recordings often feel cluttered, sluggish, and visually distracting, pulling the viewer’s eye away from the exact action they need to take.
The brief called for a clear, engaging visual style that adhered strictly to the Financial Times’ iconic brand identity while dramatically simplifying the interface to highlight only the essential clicks and navigation paths.
The Challenge
Rather than relying on raw screen captures, I rebuilt the FT Pro interface from the ground up in After Effects:
Strategic UI Simplification: Streamlined page layouts, trimming non-essential content and interface clutter so subscribers could immediately identify the critical buttons, search filters, and pathways.
Brand-Accurate Styling: Matched the Financial Times' signature editorial aesthetic, typography, and color palette with pixel-level precision.
Fluid Motion & Camera Work: Leveraged vector-based UI assets and smooth virtual camera tracking to guide viewer attention naturally across interactions, producing seamless transitions that raw screen capture could never achieve.
Collaborative Iteration: Partnered closely with the Marketing Manager throughout storyboarding and pacing to ensure every sequence aligned with both brand governance and product adoption targets.
Creative & Technical Execution
The final suite of five animations was integrated directly into the new FT Pro onboarding portal. By stripping away cognitive load and demonstrating platform value in seconds, the animations provide subscribers with a frictionless path into the product, driving faster feature adoption and helping users get immediate value from their subscriptions.
The Outcome