2018: A Year in Review

As another year draws to a close, it’s prime time to reflect on the past 350+ days. While it may not align with your fiscal year end, the calendar year end is a natural conclusion to 12 months worth of work. So along with your wishlist, gift-giving list and naughty-or-nice list, create a new list with professional accomplishments and accolades at the top. It’s the perfect opportunity to evaluate your analytics to see what projects provided the greatest ROI. Ask yourself: What worked well? What’s worth repeating? What would you do without? This exercise will aid you in planning your goals and objectives for 2019 and will help you wrap up your year better than the presents under your tree!

To help with your list inspo, we’re sharing our list (and checking it twice!) of highlights from the past year. Here at Switch, we’ve been fortunate to work with a variety of clients, from non-profits to global corporations, across a broad spectrum of industries. The following are just a few examples of the many projects we’ve spearheaded in 2018:

• CVIC (Community Violence Intervention Center): Any time we’re able to lend our creative vision and voice to a worthy cause such as this is a good day in our books. This character-led piece illustrates the noble work being done by CVIC and tops our list of community outreach favourites for 2018.

• BioScript Coverdale: Strong character development is a recurring theme throughout our 2018 portfolio and is something we will continue to explore in future videos. The execution in this spot effectively tells the story of Michelle’s patient journey and those who, like her, suffer with a chronic illness. Coverdale offers a range of services for these patients and we helped to tell that story in 90 seconds. This was just one in a series of spots we created for BioScript.

• Emagispace Privacy Pods: Before we even started storyboarding this spot our creative wheels were spinning. Working in an open concept environment is something we’re familiar with here at Switch and the Privacy Pods by Emagispace spoke to us! Needless to say, translating this product into a 1-minute video came naturally to us and the multiple moving parts (varied perspectives and characters) helped tell that story.  We’re proud of the final result – and coveting a few Privacy Pods ourselves!

• Change.org: The combination of clean and simple illustrations, a vibrant colour pallette and crisp sound design is evidence that less is more. In just 1 minute we were able to effectively convey the power people using change.org can harness.  The goal of this video was to increase their memberships, a driving force for their business.

• Superior Propane: Again, we’ve utilized a character-led story and strong motion graphics to illustrate the propane monitoring solutions Superior Propane provides homeowners.  We blended their platform interface and icons into our design seamlessly. Overall, this customer facing video showcases simple and scaled illustrations on a white background for maximum impact.

• Awards & Accolades: Any best-of list would be incomplete without blatantly tooting your own horn! At Switch we were honoured to receive the Ontario Export Award in the Services category this past November. This event recognizes businesses that excel in our province’s national and global export market through innovative approaches. The competition was stiff and we were thrilled to come out on top.

These are just a few samples of the work we’ve delivered over the past year that we’re proud of. It’s important to note that not all projects can be shared due to privacy or proprietary reasons. We do hope you’ve enjoyed these videos and will explore even more of our feature work in our newly updated demo reel. We’d love to hear your thoughts on our top 5 videos so please leave a comment or get in touch!

To ALL the relationships we’ve fostered and to new ones formed in 2018 – we salute you! We are grateful to be able to bring your products, services and programs to life through animated explainer videos.  We look forward to expressing our passion for strong design and articulate copy through many more projects in 2019. We’d love to have your video on our list this time next year.

So, what projects top your list for 2018? What trends did you see throughout the year that you want to carry forward to 2019? We’ve touched on a few in the examples above and will continue expanding on them in future blog posts. In the meantime, make your video wishlist and put our name on it twice! You know where to find us and we’d be happy to discuss how we can fit into your video plans for 2019.