Novus Motion Lab

Overview

A self-set challenge. Can a whole family of marks come from one geometric grammar, and can each mark's animation explain how it is built instead of decorating it?

Blocks, 45 degree diagonals, a fixed grid. Twelve marks. Grid, Cross, Stack, Chevron, Ladder, Zigzag, Arrow, Triangle, Frame, Bolt, Spark, and the Novus logo itself, each captioned with the rule that produces it.

Designer and creative technologist, solo and self-initiated, July 2026. Built for Novus, an emerging Pendo product with its own visual identity, deliberately distinct from the main design system.

01 · Constrain hard, get coherence free

One grammar generates the whole set. That is the entire trick. Every mark is blocks on a grid with diagonals locked to 45 degrees, so twelve marks made months apart still look like siblings without anyone maintaining a style guide.

Motion follows the same logic. A lattice snaps together. Arms chase each other around a centre. Lightning strikes rather than fades. Each animation is the construction of the mark performed rather than an effect applied to a finished thing.

Those three, in order, are the three sentences above.

02 · The linter caught me

The 45 degree rule was not decorative, it was the constraint holding the set together, and the tier data had quietly drifted to about 41 degrees.

I did not notice by eye. A linter I had written to enforce the rule noticed.

Writing the rule down as something a machine can check turned out to matter more than writing it down as a principle. A principle in a document degrades silently. A principle in a linter fails the build.

03 · Build the generator, not the outputs

The piece I would actually show is the builder. Constrained generation behind a gate I called Laws, so a teammate could produce a new on-brand mark without me and without breaking the system.

That changes what the deliverable is. Not twelve marks, but the thing that makes the thirteenth correctly.

I also formalised responsive tiers, condensed through regular through expanded, and later reframed them as two axes, size and density, which is the version that actually held up.

04 · Arguing for the option I liked less

The style debate is the part worth telling.

Two candidate directions. Style 1 was the restrained one. Style 2 was more expressive, and I preferred Style 2. So did one of the senior designers.

I argued for Style 1 as the production path anyway, because Style 2 was too distracting in flow. A mark that appears next to text someone is reading has a different job from a mark on a landing page, and my preference was formed looking at it in isolation.

I let the deployed lab and the builder carry the argument rather than my opinion, which meant the people disagreeing with me could go and check.

Calling it two directions is the tidy version. There were four.

Style 3 was an LED treatment, the mark resolving on a dot matrix. It had the best case for scale of any of them, because a grid of lights is modular by construction and would have survived any size I threw at it. It was also the hardest to read. At the sizes these actually appear the dots stop being a mark and start being a texture, and I could not make that go away.

Style 4 scrambled and resolved, characters landing one by one until the word appeared. People liked that one, and it fits the brand better than it has any right to. It is also the one I would not put in a product. A mark that looks like it is decrypting something reads as is my computer being hacked, not the app is thinking. That is a fine feeling on a marketing page and the wrong one next to somebody's data, so it is parked rather than dead.

Style 1 won because it reads as the brand mark. The others were all recognisably a system; this one was recognisably ours, and that is why it kept getting worked on while the rest sat still.

Style 1 is what went forward. The reviewer it was built for described it as something to raise more broadly and try to get into production, and floated swapping the generic loading spinners as an easy first win.

Reflection

This one has no business metric attached and I am keeping it in anyway.

It is the clearest evidence I have of the thing I actually do: pick a constraint tight enough to be annoying, hold it, build the generator rather than the artifact, and then make a machine check the rule so my own eye cannot quietly relax it.

The marks were later ported into Novus's real codebase, replacing hardcoded hex illustrations with ones that inherit theme colour. That was the point at which a self-set exercise became the product's actual motion identity.

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Want the whole system, not just the spike? The full lab is nine views: the builder, the rules, the tiers, the loaders.

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