Colpal Leadership Forum 2025

Client: Colgate-Palmolive Production: Diagonal Media Role: Motion Designer, Tool/Tool-kitting Dev, Pipeline & Workflow Dev

The Colgate-Palmolive Leadership Forum is an annual internal event bringing together senior executives and global team leads. DGNL was tasked with producing a series of branded video deliverables (including opening sizzles, speaker intros, panel interstitials, and recap reels) to be shown throughout the live forum and in pre-event communications.

Each video had to reflect ColPal’s visual identity while tailoring the messaging and energy for a high-impact leadership audience. This year’s forum also marked a brand refresh, introducing updated assets that needed to be incorporated consistently across all deliverables.

01 The Challenge

With over 25 video assets on a 2 months timeline, the team had to manage staggered deadlines, parallel workstreams, and split branding: Day 1 used legacy branding, while Day 2 marked the reveal of ColPal’s refreshed identity. Editors and designers worked asynchronously, which made visual consistency a top priority. Graphics, transitions, and animation systems had to align across contributors and evolve with the brand shift, all without disrupting momentum or deliverable quality. As a Motion Designer, I’ve realized this is one of the hardest parts—how do we stay efficient and in sync without tripping over one another?

02 Building Motion System Tools

It may be surprising, but the solution lies in applying affordance theory; creating animation rigs and tools that intentionally build in constraints. Instead of everyone animating in their own way, setting clear rules for how elements move and behave makes consistency the natural outcome for the whole team. Below are two main tools that

Brand Motifs

When the client handed us 36 static motif files (12 shapes in 3 different brand colors and sizes!) it quickly became clear that expecting artists to swap these manually would slow down production and invite inconsistency. I saw an opportunity to simplify the process: instead of handing artists a folder of files, I built a custom .ffx preset that recreated the entire system. With just a few dropdowns and sliders, anyone on the team could select a shape, pick a brand color, adjust the size, and add built-in motion like drift and delay. What was once a tedious manual task became a fast, repeatable, and on-brand experience;freeing up artists to focus on animation, not asset management.

Brand Rectangle

Tool development doesn’t always mean building a complex animation rig; sometimes it’s about creating a simple system that helps the whole team animate consistently. For this tool, I created a rectangle with rounded corners and added wipe controls so it behaves like trim paths, making it especially useful for transitions.