Studio Kiln Built BAFTA’s 2026 Identity Around Motion, Not Logos

Studio Kiln has revealed a new visual identity for the 2026 BAFTA awards season, covering all four ceremonies: Film, Television, Games and Craft. The studio was originally hired only to produce a PR campaign, but the brief grew into a full identity overhaul. The standout decision was to let motion lead everything else. Particle animations built in Figma and animated in Cavalry were finalised before a single type choice or layout was locked, flipping the conventional brand-design process on its head.

What happened

Detail	Fact
Studio	Studio Kiln
Client	BAFTA
Ceremonies covered	Film, Television, Games, Craft
Original brief	PR campaign only
Motion tool	Cavalry
Design tool	Figma
Previous system	Colour-led
New system	Animated particle forms

Studio Kiln was initially asked to handle BAFTA’s PR campaign for the 2026 season. The scope expanded into a full visual identity covering all four annual awards. The resulting system replaces the organisation’s older colour-based approach with shimmering particle fields that reference how gemstones are actually formed: pressure, erosion and transformation rather than the finished jewel itself.

Designer Meg Mardon explained the thinking: “When something goes from rough to refined, what’s the process behind that? It’s being eroded, impacted by pressure. We felt that made it a little deeper than just showing gems, which could have become quite tacky or pretentious.”

How the identity was built

The particle graphics look three-dimensional but are built entirely in 2D. The team used Figma for asset development and Cavalry for animation, a combination that kept the workflow tight across a multi-ceremony system where each award needed its own visual character while remaining instantly recognisable as BAFTA.

Each ceremony was given a distinct treatment within the shared particle system. Film uses the most restrained execution. Games introduces more complex, puzzle-like forms. Craft focuses on what lies beneath surfaces. Television sits within the same logic. Designer Edoardo Albertini noted that the underlying process stayed consistent: “You could change the shape and the colour, but the way everything appeared stayed consistent enough that you’d always recognise it as BAFTA.”

Why motion came before everything else

The most significant process decision was sequencing. Studio Kiln finalised the animated key art before touching typography or layout. Mardon described it directly: “The moving key art came before anything else. We didn’t start on the type or the wider system until we’d figured out the motion. It felt like that was the living system, and everything else followed on from that.”

For typography, the studio tested more radical options before landing on a contemporary serif. The goal was heritage without stuffiness. Albertini described the final choice as having “openness and modernity” while retaining elegance.

What constrained the design

Existing sponsorship agreements locked in several colour palettes across the ceremonies, which capped how different each could look. Rather than fighting those limits, Mardon and Albertini worked on vibrancy and contrast within the fixed colours to give the particles depth and luminosity.

Why it matters

The BAFTA project is a clear example of a shift that has been building in brand design for a few years. Screens are the primary context for almost every brand today, whether that is a social post, a broadcast graphic or a website header. Designing a static logo first and animating it later produces stiff results because the motion is always an afterthought.

Studio Kiln’s approach treats the animated state as the source of truth and derives the static assets from it. That is a meaningful process change for any team doing UI and UX design for digital products, not just broadcast identities. If a component does not move well, it often means the underlying design is too rigid for the contexts it will actually appear in.

Tools like Figma and Cavalry are now capable enough that this kind of motion-first workflow does not require a separate motion studio or a broadcast-specialist post-production team. The barrier to doing this on a smaller budget has dropped considerably.

Our take

Motion-first identity work is genuinely harder to sell to clients than static-first work, because the early deliverables look unfinished: no logo lockup, no colour swatches, just particles doing something interesting on a timeline. Getting a client to trust that process requires a clear brief and a shared understanding of what the final system is meant to do. BAFTA’s gemstone metaphor gave Studio Kiln a strong conceptual anchor that made the motion rationale easy to explain and defend.

The sponsorship colour constraint is also worth noting. Real-world identity projects almost always carry legacy obligations that limit creative freedom. The interesting design skill is not ignoring those constraints but finding the dimension, in this case particle luminosity and contrast, where you still have room to work. That is the kind of problem-solving that separates a good brand system from a pretty mood board.

For teams building digital products or web interfaces, the same logic applies: if you are doing a website redesign and animation is not part of the conversation until the final handoff, you are probably going to end up with motion that feels bolted on. Start with how things move, then design the rest around it.

What to do about it

1. Define the motion behaviour of your core UI components before finalising static layouts in your next design project.
2. Use Figma’s prototyping and variables to test transitions early, then bring in a dedicated animation tool (Cavalry, Rive, or Lottie) once the logic is confirmed.
3. Map any fixed constraints, brand colours, sponsor requirements, existing assets, at the start so the design effort goes into the dimensions that are actually open.
4. Pressure-test static exports from your animated assets; if they look flat or confused without motion, the underlying design needs more work.

The practical takeaway: treat animation as the design brief, not the decoration at the end.

Source: Bing News · Figma