Above are the final different versions of announcements gifs for The Pinch announcement. The Pinch is an internal reoccurring series that lets the company know what different teams and different departments are up to. It is called The Pinch for its bite-size content format.

In my first pass, I had two different directions that I explored. On the left I had the idea of a block revealing what The Pinch was about and then a title reveal. The different dots are an abstract way to showing all the different stories to pick from. On the right I had the idea of animating a pinch zoom—like something you might do on a tablet or iPad. It came from the idea of zooming in on a smaller story—made big through The Pinch stories.

I continued forward with the concept on the left, in the first pass I got the feedback the dots were too abstract and not clear what it was communicating. So I animated a pass where the reveal is more of the icon set of showing different stories like in a blog. However it felt trite.

I really liked the spin of the fist pass and wanted that motion somewhere within the final, and I also thought more about playing more into the name The Pinch visually so in this pass I used a hand icon in a pinch gesture to communicate the idea of selecting a story in a abstract way. However something about this, didn’t feel finished.

I added a colorful glow blur in the back to help direct the eye to which bar was going to be selected by the pinch hand icon that fades out during the title reveal. Afterwards I created different colored versions so that we would be able to cycle through them and not have the same announcement gif each time The Pinch publishes a new set of stories.