Our Power-Couple: Mr. OLLO and Fabia Matveev!

The decisive advantage of an animation compared to a static illustration is probably the greater attention that the moving image can generate. Especially in times when the attention span is getting shorter and shorter, an animation helps to stand out from the crowd: The viewer scrolls down his social media feed, is "caught" by an animation and takes his time for the message because he curious to see how the story ends.

Sometimes animation is even the only way to implement a scenario that is difficult to access, an abstract idea, or to present products in an extraordinary way. Even short animations can draw more attention to a simple message and breathe life into it, e.g. by the illustrated characters moving in an interesting way, thereby gaining sympathy and recognition value.

The ingredients for great animation are a well thought out concept, great storytelling, a distinctive style and (when appropriate) a dash of humor. An all this and more combines two of our artists into a real power couple: Mr. OLLO and Fabia Matveev.

Mr. OLLO and Fabia Matveev have been a couple for ten years and have been working on joint projects for almost as long. As a result, they influenced each other's style and there are clear overlaps, such as working with vectors, geometry and bright colors, but also characteristic differences in content and form.

Both artists always pursue a conceptual and holistic approach in their projects, which is why motion design and interaction are a matter of course right from the start. Customers are also noticing that moving images are becoming an increasingly important area for their brand communication.

The greatest added value for customers is that, thanks to Fabia's experience as an illustrator and Mr. OLLO's experience as a motion and graphic designer / art director, they can cover many areas together as a team: conception, illustration, animation, graphic design, typography and web design . In addition, thanks to their close cooperation, they are able to connect and coordinate the different areas and work processes within the projects. This means time and money savings for the customer. And a much better end result because everything is perfectly aligned and everything is in one piece, even though two people with different strengths are working on the project.

When they work together on a project, Fabia usually does the illustrations and Mr. OLLO does the animation. In coordination with Mr. OLLO, Fabia builds the illustrations in such a way that they are perfectly prepared for animation: She creates individual layers for the elements to be animated, with joints and in deliberately neutral poses for better character rigging in the animation. Since both share a studio, the distances are short and Fabia can react quickly to adjustment requests from Mr. OLLO if, for example, he notices during the animation that the left sock still needs to be seen and illustrated... ;)

The concept phase with brainstorming is particularly important for your projects: Here you lay the foundation for the best possible coordination of illustration and animation to fulfill the customer briefing. Because illustration and animation are thought of together, a precise idea of what the animation should look like later is already created during the conception of the illustration. This avoids creating illustrations that turn out to be too time-consuming for the time window or budget during the animation process.

Since Mr. OLLO works with vectors in his illustrations and has done a lot in the field of vector animation for the web in recent years, he is increasingly creating animations in SVG or Lottie format. These have a smaller file size than videos or GIFs, for example, can be scaled to any format without appearing pixelated and allow additional interactive elements that involve the viewer more.

Furthermore, Mr. OLLO also has experience in web design and programming, which is particularly helpful when projects require conception, illustration and animation for the web and he can provide the necessary overview of current technical possibilities on the web.

Here are more joint projects of Mr. OLLO and Fabia Matveev:

»Characters« for Samsung (Fabia: Illustration / Mr. OLLO: Animation)
The second in-house advent calendar was created for Samsung with illustrations and animations of employees, whose moving portraits reflect the character and special qualities of the person. In the meantime, over 40 mostly animated illustrations have been created.