Capy.ai - Taking an existing brand into motion
Motion & illustration for a launch video, built inside Capy's existing comic identity.
DATE
2026
ROLE
Concepting & Storyboarding
Illustration Direction
UI & Visual Design
TEAM
Graphic & Narrative Designer (Me!)
Illustrator
Motion Designer
The ask
Capy builds an AI coding agent for engineering teams. Their audience is senior software engineers, people already fluent in the tech world who don't need the basics explained to them. There was a Figma file, but it hadn't kept up with the product since most of the product lived in code. Their team needed a launch video that could speak to that audience without over-explaining anything they already knew.
First move
Before touching a single frame, I sat down with the Capy team to actually understand the product: how the agents work, what makes it different, what it feels like to use.
Direction
I pitched three tonal routes: full motion illustration, real human presenters, or a hybrid of both. Each concept is presented with a plot, sample storyboard(wireframes), and motion inspirations.
We went with full motion. Capy's brand already lived in a comic-style world, its mascot, its tone, its illustrations. Dropping in real actors would have broken the illusion the brand had already built.
Storyboarding
I mapped the video key frame by key frame before finalizing the assets. I checked the pacing by making small slide-show style video and brainstorm with our motion designer.
Speeding up concepting
I used generative AI only to rough out early concepts and direction, and not for anything final, since AI-generated art carries real IP questions. The illustrator then took those sketches, adjusted the composition, and pushed each one to hi-res, matching Capy's existing illustration style and shading the whole way through.
The part with no shortcuts
The video shows real UI of the product - task cards, the agent chat, the pull request flow. Like a lot of early-stage teams, the client's figma file/design system hadn't caught up to what had shipped, which are also constantly changing, so the product itself was the more reliable source. I decided to skip the file and rebuilt every screen directly from the live product instead, matching it exactly 1:1.
Hand-off
Our motion designer is looped in early and stays informed throughout. Every key frame carries motion notes wherever the visual alone doesn't communicate enough. Assets are laid out cleanly.
Metrics
122.6K Views, 772 Likes and more than 450 replies on @capydotai.
