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What do we call the animations the Animation Studio makes?

· 3 min read
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Jon-Michael Lastimosa
Senior Web Developer

The question: The Studio's output is not a slideshow and not a presentation, and it is not a video either. What is the sellable name for it? "Kinetic HTML typography" was the first idea, since the output is HTML.

Context​

A scene plays on one continuous timeline: text, shapes, screenshots, 3D, camera moves, transitions and sound. It is live HTML, so its words are real text search engines read, its buttons are real links, and it stays sharp and small. The homepage hero is the first one on our own site: an animated explainer that settles into a looping hero.

Options considered​

  • Kinetic HTML typography. Says HTML, but "kinetic typography" means animated text only, so it undersells a medium that moves far more than type, and "HTML" is a reason to buy rather than a thing people ask for.
  • Live Scenes / Motion Heroes. Clear, but "Heroes" is too narrow for tours, explainers and Video mode. Anything close to "LiveMotion" is out: that was an Adobe product.
  • Kinetic Scenes. Keeps the kinetic energy, and "scene" is already what the Studio and the Studio Scene element call it, so the product, the docs and the marketing share one word.

Decision​

Kinetic Scenes is the name. The category line carries the HTML advantage: "HTML motion graphics for your website", "Looks like video. Works like a web page."

A small "Made with Kinetic Scenes · Make yours free" badge links to the Studio (tagged for analytics). It is added to our own scenes only, as an ordinary linked layer, never by the player, the Studio export or the WordPress element, so other people's embeds never carry it.

Why​

A name should describe the whole thing and match the product's own vocabulary; the differentiator belongs where it can be explained. Keeping the badge to our own sites gets the growth loop where we control the page, without putting credit links on anyone else's site (which WordPress's plugin rules forbid without consent, and which would cost the goodwill a free tool depends on).

Update: the tool takes the name too​

While still in alpha, the Animation Studio itself was renamed Kinetic Scenes: one name for the tool and what it makes. It moved to kinetic-scenes.unysonplus.com (repository UnysonPlus-Kinetic-Scenes), the WordPress element became the Kinetic Scene element, and these docs moved to /kinetic-scenes (the old pages redirect). No one used the old address yet, so it was retired rather than kept.