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.