A Live Story
Client: Personio
Role: Lead 2D Motion Design: built the cross-artist pipeline
Background
HUG is Personio's flagship event. Munich, 2024: 2,200 people from around the world, 15+ keynotes, 20+ workshops, hundreds of meetings. And this was the year that mattered most, the stage where Personio introduced its Intelligent HR Platform and gave customers their first look at its AI features.
I led the motion design for all of it. Over 200 pieces of content, every keynote on the program.
Problem
Live is the one format with no undo. Every animation synced to a presenter's clicker, when the CEO clicks, it fires or it doesn't, in front of 2,200 people. There's no second render, no "we'll fix it in the next pass." The work either holds or it fails in public.
And the content wouldn't sit still. Decks doubled and tripled in slide count as the event approached. Design changes kept landing right up against the deadline.
HUG Event
Challenge
The decks lived in Figma, great for the design team, rough for motion. Getting clean assets out meant fighting the format itself. Add multiple artists working in parallel, 15+ keynotes that had to feel like one show, and a timeline that left no room to explore. Speed and structure had to win over experimentation, without the work looking like it.
Approach
I built the motion system to be fast, simple, and impossible to break: a clean, flexible setup in After Effects that absorbed constant changes and tight deadlines without losing consistency. Where the format fought us, I found the way through, a plugin workaround to extract what we needed from Figma cleanly.
Then I built the pipeline around the people. A clear folder structure and workflow so the production team could move through the crunch without losing its mind. Multiple artists, one system, one look. And where the timeline allowed, I snuck in 2.5D moments to give flat slides some depth on a forty-foot screen.
Results
Show day: every cue fired. No errors, no last-minute scrambles, fifteen-plus keynotes running clean in front of 2,200 people. The system outlived the event. Personio reused it for their sizzle(s). The launch still came down to craft, structure, and people who don't miss.