350 designers strong, DEMO Festival 2025 proves just how far motion design has come

If you happened to be darting through Amsterdam Centraal, wandering the streets of Barcelona, or sitting on a bus on your way into Leeds on 30 January, it’s likely your head would have been turned by motion design. Starting in 2019, and on a biannual basis since, DEMO Festival – founded by Studio Dumbar/DEPT® – has taken up the unlikely home of public screens. Creating a one-of-a-kind design festival in the process, for 24 blissful hours, digital out-of-home partners offer up their screens, simply but impactfully, to support an ever-growing community of motion designers.

What began as a 24-hour takeover of Amsterdam train station screens in 2019 grew to 5,000 screens and a global call-out in 2022. However, the 2025 festivities took a cities approach. Expanding across 15 cities and seven countries, from Düsseldorf to Cardiff and Vancouver, purposeful attendees (or just passersby) could watch the work of over 350 designers featured this year.

This free, completely open-to-the-public motion design festival has gradually grown in size and stature since the first edition six years ago. In Studio Dumbar creative director Liza Enebis’ mind, DEMO 2019 “was more about getting to know each other”, she tells It’s Nice That. At that time, the motion design scene was still finding its feet: “A lot of people were familiar with each other’s work online, but not really in real life,” continues Liza, “or had seen their own work, or others’, on such a scale – as we were confined to our phones and laptop screens.” The increased demand for motion during and post-lockdowns then heavily influenced the 2022 edition. “The gathering was significant in another sense, with a lot of new people joining who had spent the two (pandemic) years learning new skills,” says Liza. But this year, “2025 really felt like we can truly call it a community.”

At DEMO’s primary base in Amsterdam Centraal, this sense of community was clear to see. The festival itself is incredible to witness; you only realise how much advertising there is once it’s all taken away. And the Studio Dumbar team could stop there, but instead, a train station becomes their home for the day. Wandering around, you’re likely to see mini groups of tours, with the designers and curators of the festival quickly telling you about a person’s work on screen before it blends into the next. Waiting rooms are transformed into workshop spaces to learn about no-code generative motion design, or lessons on creative restraints using just paper and pen. Figures in motion – from Chris Kore to Vera van der Seyp and Daisy Chain Studio – also partake in a symposium of sorts, where visitors can pop in and out of talks. “I feel it’s a very generous community willing to share new tools, test new applications, and give constructive feedback,” adds Liza. “There is a general understanding that we need to help each other out, in order to further our profession.”

DEMO’s part in this understanding is offering a space to reflect and, most importantly, to toast the work itself. “DEMO is there to celebrate the work,” adds Liza. “It’s not a competition… It’s about creating the best exhibition as a whole collective. From the start, it was not about the most established names. Within the group of participants, there were people literally showcasing the first piece they had ever made in motion.”

This celebration also allows for the assortment of styles taking hold in motion design to come to the forefront. Submissions for DEMO cannot be attached to brand or client work, creating a showcase of genuine experimentation in a rapidly changing and growing medium. Given motion’s clear ties to graphic design, DEMO was initially awash with typographic pieces – an attribute that has quickly been replaced by more abstract pieces as designers reshape the medium. There are two theories behind this shift of interest. “One is that this year the festival was international, and maybe designers found it hard to find one universal message that could appeal to everyone,” says Liza. “The other is the rise of new tools, or an adaptation of tools such as Touch Designer, which seems very popular and calls for more abstract aesthetics.”

But alongside ever-morphing gradients, a key aspect of this year’s submissions was humour. “There were a lot of frog animations and a lot of cars – no idea what happened there – we all thought the participants were inspired by one of the curators, Yonk, who has a lot of character work,” adds Liza. The final list of themes across the day’s curation demonstrates this assortment of styles and influences currently appealing to motion designers. Zeroes and Ones, for example, demonstrated a clear interest in stripping motion back to its simplest form – with the majority of the work just in black and white. On The Move is more of a run through of walk cycles, ever changing in style and output – from the drawn to 3D. While Frogs, Fruit and Flowers shows the always expanding capacity motion has to render real life. 

Within each of these themes are also a mix of new and more established names, but chances are they all came through DEMO to begin with. For Liza, this is always the highlight: “I guess for me personally, to see people very early in their careers who exhibited in 2019 are now known within the industry, and that DEMO played a small part in that, is really rewarding.”

Now the Studio Dumbar team can down tools on DEMO for another few months, but bigger plans are characteristically already brewing. “The world has 192 countries. We had participants from 92 countries, so we still have a way to go. And this year, we were in seven countries, so we have an even longer way to go,” concludes Liza.