A few years ago, while in conversation with RES Magazine, Beat Baudenbacher and David Herbruck, co-founders of New York-based design studio LoyalKaspar, were in an expansive frame of mind. Known for elegant yet eye-popping broadcast design work for clients including Showtime, MTV and the Lime Network, the duo was already looking to a life beyond idents. While admitting that they were "a little conflicted" about where they wanted to head next, they knew that movement was a necessity, not an option. "This is a means to an end," Herbruck told RES. "We have aspirations to affect the world on a broader scale than broadcast design."

Fast-forward a few years. The company, celebrating its fifth anniversary this year, has taken over another floor of its Crosby Street residence - "We were busting out of our offices," says Baudenbacher. While the major ambition discussed in that article a few years back - a feature film - is still just that, an ambition, there have been moves to, as Herbruck put it, affect the world on a broader scale, ranging from a record label to excursions into longer-form content. "There are so many ways to bring filmmaking and design together now," says Baudenbacher. "I know there are a lot of things that I want us to do."

Evolution is a process that doesn't tend to stop and ask for directions. Most in the broadcast and advertising industries are seeing firsthand how new technologies in both creation of content and delivery are pushing everyone involved into uncharted territory. The companies that came to life in the motion graphics explosion of the mid-to-late-'90s are finding that just as the means of messaging in multi-platform media are shifting, so too do they have to morph into new creative entities.

"I don't think it's particularly strategic," says Imaginary Forces co-founder Peter Frankfurt about his company's evolutionary process. Created in 1996, during the early days of motion design, IF's groundbreaking work in film titles (Seven, Spider-Man, countless others) made it a standard-bearer for the burgeoning design discipline. "It always has more to do with the DNA of the company, which is expressing storytelling using design, but not really caring exactly what the delivery system is."

Frankfurt says that in IF's case, the company found its feet by riding the heady waves of new creative technologies, developed in tandem with motion design's growing popularity in broadcast and film. "Being a motion design company at first, we were working with a lot of [new] software," he says. "Back in the day it was Alias, and then After Effects and then 3D Studio Max [now 3ds Max], Maya, Cinema 4D. We came across a lot of people that were proficient in that sort of software, especially in the 3D side, that weren't necessarily designers. Some of them were architects, some of them were engineers and product designers. The tool set that we used overlapped with a lot of these other disciplines and that made trying new things that much easier."

For others, the charge into new territory comes more as a result of market forces than mechanics. In 2005, Los Angeles-based Exopolis was featured in a Boards Broadcast Design report, focusing on the "new kids" working in the field. While the company's principals - Daniel Arcana, Kat Egan and Jared Mazzaschi - were conversant in the ways of the Web, having teamed up in the wake of the dot-com bubble burst, the thought of contributing to and creating fully integrated production pipelines for clients seemed more like a pipe dream in the early '00s.

"When we started off we were five people and we just thought we were going to be a little design boutique," Arcana says. "We thought it would be cool to do print, web and TV, but that's about as thought-out as it was six years ago. The marketing landscape has propelled the integrated approach to the forefront, and that's great for us."

That approach is coming into play more and more often as agencies and direct-to-client assignments call for increasingly multi-channeled campaigns. A just-launched campaign for Tylenol through Deutsch, NY saw Exopolis charged with creating an integrated campaign incorporating web content and TV spots, centered around a fake, ESPN-styled panel program in which NASCAR drivers offer viewers/users advice on, well, practically anything. Arcana says that the company took the experience it gained in developing integrated work for Crispin Porter + Bogusky's 2005 MINI USA campaign, in which design thinking was at the center of the production process.

"The best way to do these campaigns is to think like you're creating a product," he says. "You start with a logo, font systems and color palettes, and then you move to mood boards and style frames, and then you have the style guide from which you can design a website, print ads, banner ads - the whole asset library is established." It's a process that's especially useful when every aspect of the campaign is meant to emerge from the web work. In the case of the Tylenol project, Exopolis tapped Smuggler to work on the shoot for the web content, from which :30 spots will be derived. With Exopolis having a fully-developed, TV-ready sensibility through its broadcast design work, Arcana says it made them a top candidate for producing web content that mirrors the broadcast experience.

Similarly, Venice-based Logan found that its fusion of design and directorial skill sets, evolved over the last several years, gave it an edge in its latest foray into content creation. Tapped by Hideo Kojima, the creator of the popular Metal Gear Solid videogames, to create original content for the series' fourth and final chapter, Logan collaborated with Kojima and his team in the concepting and then handled every aspect of the project in-house, from the script to the live-action shoot to the CG-intensive post.

"It was an incredible opportunity - this sort of thing doesn't usually happen in real life," says Logan co-founder Alexei Tylevich. He worked closely with Kojima on the concept and directed the 12 minutes of content which kicks off the game, consisting of fake satellite broadcasts of commercials and TV shows from the year 2014. "I think Hideo was attracted to us being this hybrid creative entity. If you look at the creation of video games, the process is very integrated, and our process is very similar to the way Hideo works with his team. They do everything internally. It wasn't such a leap of faith - it's an accepted way of working for them."

For a company to successfully bring that DIY attitude to projects, it requires having both a multi-faceted staff and the ability to network with those in other creative disciplines, such as writers, coders and whomever else may be needed to pull off the work that creative studios are signing up for. Arcana makes it a point to put their staff of 25 in an integrated work space where they can feed off each other's expertise.

"A lot of these people have learned over the last couple of years to do two or three different things," he says. "So my best Flash animator is also one of my best After Effects animators. They come in being really kick-ass at something, and they tell me the areas they want to grow in. So I'll put them next to the person who's doing that."

Tylevich concurs. "I don't think it's so much about creating infrastructure, while that is important. It's about creating a collective of people that are capable of doing different things, and people that take an experimental approach to the job at hand."

For IF, hiring an increasingly multi-dimensional workforce has kept the bicoastal company, with full-time staff numbers at around 65, agile enough to devote considerable talent and resources to the exploding field of experiential design, which has also been explored by companies such as Universal Everything, Digital Kitchen and Brand New School. Its most recent undertaking is the incredible New City exhibit, a collaboration with architecture guru Greg Lynn and film production designer Alex McDowell which debuted at the Museum of Modern Art and combines mograph with CGI and sound design to create an immersive web-based world. It's just one of the experiential adventures IF has embarked upon since diving into the field several years back. But, according to IF co-founder Chip Houghton, it's only recently that agencies have been pushing for more experiential work, and as client thinking evolves, so must that of the creatives on his team.

"For some people, that may not be what they signed up for when they came to IF - they might've come here because they loved the title design in Seven," says Houghton. "But then sometimes people grab it and run faster than us, and other times we have to apply a little pressure to push our creatives into other venues. That's a lot of what Peter and I do - coaching, pleading [with] or forcing some of the teams to step outside of their boxes into these other platforms."

Sometimes the will is there to expand into new areas, but if your shop has the blessing of being extremely busy with the kinds of projects that you've built your reputation on, branching out can take time. LoyalKaspar's Baudenbacher says moving into music by launching a full-service record label in 2005 with debut act Tessa Perry made sense on a number of levels - it was something they wanted to do, and as a design studio, it could provide more work via CD packaging, music video production and print marketing through the artists it signed. Still, it took time to understand the ins and outs of music distribution, especially on the physical side. With the company wrapped up in assorted commercial campaigns, broadcast design assignments (such as a recent Fuse TV rebrand) and long-form branding work, time can be a rare luxury. "If we ever get the time to breathe again, we'll do more [with the label]," says Baudenbacher.

Some evolutionary transitions are easier to incorporate than others. Bicoastal Transistor Studios recently hired a new interactive CD, Chris Eyerman, whose background includes stints at Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Big Interactive. Like Exopolis' Arcana, Transistor ECD James Price says the studio was always convergence-minded; still, "it was a nice theory but a virtual impossibility until about two-and-a-half years ago. The technology started to merge a lot more." But while Exopolis has an in-house strategy division which is, according to Arcana, "capable of writing everything from press releases to scripts for short films", Price says design is ultimately the integral offering it provides for interactive jobs, such as its Flash work for Goodby, Silverstein & Partners' acclaimed "Think About It" site for Hyundai.

From a client perspective, however, keeping track of who's doing what can be difficult, especially in these multi-disciplinary days. "We'll hear people tell us that they assumed we wouldn't be interested in doing something because it was a standard motion graphics job," says Price. "They assume those sorts of jobs don't interest us any more. We do have to manage that [perception] with our clients."

Others find that a "divide and conquer" approach, in which divisions devoted to an area of expertise are splintered off as sister companies, works best in terms of managing workflow and client relationships. Logan recently created a VFX/post-oriented division, dubbed Mørk & Lys (Danish for "dark and light") to deal with jobs that called more for that discipline, while Eyeball NYC founder Limore Shur co-founded Expansion Team, a sister company devoted to music and sound design.

As for what the near future holds, just as design studios that added live action and interactive work to their repertoire morphed into creative studios, some see the addition of strategy divisions and planners, combined with the concerted move towards content creation and away from work-for-hire projects, as a move towards their next big phase of evolution. "Sometimes we act almost as an agency because we're thinking strategically about how all these things can connect, and we also have to figure out the return of investment for these things in order to justify budgets," explains IF's Frankfurt. "It's forced us to grow up and think like adults."

Still, regardless of the permutations and transformations ahead for design companies and their staffs, those polled say the moves are made in keeping with the foundation upon which these companies have been built - namely, design and mograph. Simply put, you gotta stay true to your roots.

"We started out doing a lot of broadcast design and a lot of what was part of the motion graphic scene," says Logan's Tylevich, who, for his part, would love to get into game design. "We want to build on that background, not throw it away or deny it."

Exopolis http://www.exopolis.com
Imaginary Forces http://www.imaginaryforces.com
Logan http://www.hellologan.com
LoyalKaspar http://www.loyalkaspar.com
Transistor Studios http://www.transistorstudios.com