Australian motion design house XYZ Studios made a considerable splash internationally with its identity package for the 2005 AGIdeas conference, the largest design gathering in the Southern Hemisphere. Taking imagery created by Cato Design for the print ad campaign (a white sheet with a Mac screen grab projected onto it) and rendering it into flowing, whirling 3D, the work drew accolades (including a win for design director/founder Tim Kentley in this year's First Boards Awards), and made XYZ a shoo-in for the 2006 edition, held in early May.

This time, Kentley worked from a "sketch on the theme of selection", featuring three pieces that resembled Spirograph doodles. An open-ended assignment - to come up with something completely new for the opening, as well as introductory animations for over 30 speakers - saw Kentley return to his first design brief at university for inspiration.

"We were simply asked to tear up a sheet of black paper and position [the pieces] on a white sheet of paper," he recalls. "It was a completely abstract process, and yet there was general consensus in the room about which compositions worked and which didn't." With that in mind, Kentley opted to depict this year's theme - suitably, inspiration - with "completely abstract, CG imagery cropped and edited in a way that engages."

Kentley transformed the line drawings of the preliminary sketches into interlocking, swirling 3D ribbons that settle into spirals and vortices for a moment before stretching further across the canvas. The dazzling display of color and shape, interspersed with copy concerning "the journey between curiosity and discovery" and other points of inspiration, was crafted using Maya Paint Effects, traditionally used to create plant imagery.

"I like to employ the technology, in this case Maya, in a way it's not necessarily designed to be used, like punks did when they started wearing safety pins as fashion jewelry," explains Kentley. Generating curves with a particle system, Kentley used Maya's construction history to manipulate the curves, which in turn manipulated the paint effects, allowing for a very dynamic system. A rig comprised of 12 cameras "pointing and moving at different parts of the geometry" was created to generate depth of motion.

Kentley's abstract experiments resulted in mesmerizing motion imagery that serves as both a complement to and an improvement upon the 2005 work.

"I guess on one level you know that comparisons will be made between the two idents, but you can't let that shape you," he says. "You just have to go back to your source, the uncharted creative landscape within, and find new forms to show the world."

XYZ Studios> http://www.xyzstudios.com
AGIdeas 2006> http://www.agideas.net/2006