DIRECTV
Pause Ads Motion System
The animation design language and motion principles for Pause Ads, which appear when a viewer pauses what they're watching.
Context
Pause Ads are one of the formats from DIRECTV’s advertising innovation team. They appear at the one moment a viewer has chosen to step away from the screen. That makes them unusually sensitive: the format only works if it respects the pause rather than hijacking it.
My role
I established the animation design language and motion principles for Pause Ads, defining the visual behavior of still-image slide transitions: how an ad enters, how it holds attention, how one image hands off to the next, and how it gets out of the way when playback resumes.
The constraints
- Stills, not video. The creative is mostly still imagery, so the motion system carries all of the sense of life.
- Creative variety. The rules had to hold up across many different advertisers’ imagery, not a single campaign.
Approach
I defined motion as a small set of principles rather than a library of one-off animations: entry timing that feels unhurried, transitions that read as calm rather than attention-seeking, and exits that yield immediately to the viewer. Because they’re principles, they apply consistently whatever the imagery.
Outcome
These principles established the animation design language for Pause Ads, including the visual behavior for still-image slide transitions.