Deliverables:
Motion design, Storyboarding
Role:
Primary designer, Motion design
When IBM needed to introduce Linux to its global internal workforce, the challenge wasn't just technical communication — it was making an unfamiliar operating system feel approachable, relevant, and worth paying attention to, for an audience of thousands of employees across every function and region.
I owned this project end-to-end as a solo creative: from writing the script and developing the storyboard, through art direction and final animation delivery.
The Brief
The video needed to explain what Linux is, why it mattered to IBM, and how it fit into employees' day-to-day work — clearly and engagingly enough to hold attention across a 2–4 minute runtime. The audience wasn't a room of engineers. It was the entire global IBM organization, meaning the content had to land for someone with deep technical fluency and someone with none.
Approach
I started with the script, working to distill a technically dense subject into a narrative that was educational without being condescending, and engaging without oversimplifying. From there I developed a full storyboard to map the visual logic of the piece before a single frame was animated — ensuring the structure was sound and stakeholder feedback could happen early, before the work became expensive to change.
Art direction followed IBM's Carbon design language, keeping the visual system consistent with the brand while giving the animation enough warmth and motion personality to feel like something other than a corporate slide deck in motion. The full piece was produced in After Effects.
Collaboration
Despite being a solo creative project, it involved meaningful stakeholder management — aligning on script direction, incorporating feedback across storyboard and animation reviews, and delivering a final cut that met both creative and communications objectives for a global audience. I also collaborated with a voiceover artist, directing the narration to ensure the tone, pacing, and delivery complemented the animation and kept the piece feeling cohesive from start to finish.
Impact
The finished animation was distributed to IBM's entire internal team worldwide — a piece of communication design that reached one of the largest enterprise workforces in the world, translating a complex technical subject into something accessible and human.
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© Kristina Selinski, 2026