Notion Assistant
Studio BuckRole animation direction, animation
In close collaboration with the internal Notion team, we had the pleasure of bringing their Notion assistant to life. This assistant is Notions response to windows word clippy. Minimal, sophisticated and warm.
With a strong roots in a hand-drawn visual style and animaiton, this project brought a unique set of challenges in making sure animation would be integrated s
eamlessly into Notions existing UI.
Notion wanted to make sure their AI Assistant responded to user actions with personality. With a priority on the assistant feeling delightful — alert and engaged, but not distracting. With this in mind, we wanted to create distinct animations that would need perform smoothly without impacting the user experience.
Notion wanted to make sure their AI Assistant responded to user actions with personality. With a priority on the assistant feeling delightful — alert and engaged, but not distracting. With this in mind, we wanted to create distinct animations that would need perform smoothly without impacting the user experience.
We worked closely with Roman Muradov, Notions inhouse illustrator and art director on the project, whos concept sketches and guideance we took as a base for how our assistant would emote and respond to user input.
From Romans sketches and direction, we got to work, and started cel animating different expressions and states for the character. By animating by hand, we were able to bring an amount of charm and playfulness that would otherwise be difficult to achieve by other methods.
As the product needed to function fluidly, and character needed to transition seamlessly between any state we used Rive’s State Machine to build a game-engine-style UX component, which allowed for expressions to mix and match organically between states.
This workflow allowed us to perserve the charming hand drawn feel, whilst optimising the file size and retaining our original cel animation performances.
Buck
Group Creative Director
Michelle Higa Fox
Creative Director
Kendra Ryan
Creative Tech Lead
Charlie Whitney
Executive Producer
Kim Stephens
Producer
Rusty Van Riper
Michelle Higa Fox
Creative Director
Kendra Ryan
Creative Tech Lead
Charlie Whitney
Executive Producer
Kim Stephens
Producer
Rusty Van Riper
Animation Direction
Thea Glad
Lead Animator
Paola Chen Li
Animators
Diego Abad
Meitar Almog
Paola Chen Li
Emanuele Colombo
Thea Glad
David Stumpf
Laura Yilmaz
Thea Glad
Lead Animator
Paola Chen Li
Animators
Diego Abad
Meitar Almog
Paola Chen Li
Emanuele Colombo
Thea Glad
David Stumpf
Laura Yilmaz