Zoe Crocker
Q&A | Zoe Crocker
Creative Director
Never Sit Still
Published
June 2025
Zoe, an award-winning motion designer and illustrator, is currently the creative director at Never Sit Still. Her seamless blend of illustration and motion has earned her a strong reputation in the design community, including a role as a judge for Motion and Emerging Designer at the AGDA awards. We'll explore her journey into motion design and gather her valuable advice for aspiring motion designers and illustrators.
01
How did you get started in motion design and illustration, and what inspired you to pursue
both fields?
I’ve always been interested in drawing and illustration.
I remember my best friend got a Wacom when we were quite young, and I begged for one for myself after getting a turn with it.
It sat in a drawer for a while until I became chronically online as a teenager, spending a lot of time on Memecentre and Tumblr. I became obsessed with people who drew their own comics and memes—I thought it was so cool—and that inspired me to dust off the Wacom.
I got my start posting crappy art on the internet and eventually began making things for my classmates, like custom birthday cards. By the time high school was ending, that was really the only thing I was genuinely interested in.
I decided a design degree with illustration electives was the best way to pursue it more formally, and ended up taking Viscom at the University
of Technology Sydney.
That’s where my passion for illustration evolved into motion. We had an elective, an introduction to After Effects, that had me hooked from the first class. It felt like the perfect way to use my illustration skills in a way that was more niche and therefore more likely to lead to a role.
And it did. I got a grad position straight out of uni at Never Sit Still, and the real inspiration to keep pursuing motion came from working with their small, talented team. There were only three others on the team, so I was close to the action—and that was extremely exciting (and a bit intimidating).
I was taught to obsess over every detail, and it became so satisfying to see static design come
to life in a way that was so carefully crafted.
02
What is your favourite project you've worked on that combines motion design and illustration, and what was the creative process like?
When I answered this question two years ago, I said the 2022 Adobe After Effects splash screen and accompanying animation. It still holds a strong favourite status in my heart, it was a time when I was still doing much of the illustration and animation myself, and just starting to dip my toe into direction.
As a more recent example, the project I’m most proud of is the title sequence I directed for Node Fest, Australia’s premiere conference for motion design. Like the AE splash screen, it was an open brief with full creative control, although even more so in this case. The only constraint was that we had to feature keynote speaker names in some way.
I wanted to tell a narrative that motion designers would relate to, with a strong focus on Never Sit Still’s R&D process and our house style of sleek yet dynamic typography. It was as much an opportunity to celebrate our studio as it was to celebrate and
open the event.
To represent our R&D, I wanted most of the video to come directly from experimentation and play, to have the team test anything interesting or cool, from which we identified the strongest to stitch into a sequence that featured all the speaker names.
The narrative was woven in around this, through the creation of a character who—within our story—was the one creating that R&D. That’s where illustration came in, both in designing the character and using more abstract illustration to visualise their mental state throughout the process, as we essentially depicted their descent into madness.
03
How do you balance the technical aspects of motion design with the creativity and expressiveness of illustration?
As Creative Director, I’m less hands-on with both illustration and animation these days, though I still occasionally jump in when the studio is busy, and
I still create my own illustrations for fun.
When I’m working outside of client projects, it’s important for me to be free and loose with it and reduce the pressure. I love to paint on a single layer using a digital canvas.
Motion, however, needs more structure. My preferred method of illustrating isn’t exactly compatible,
so good planning is important from the beginning, setting up layer structures that work with
animation rigs.
That said, technology in our field is evolving fast, particularly with the rise of AI tools. Things that
weren’t possible—or weren’t practical—are
becoming much more accessible, like working
with painterly styles. We used to steer low-budget projects toward clean vector illustration because it was easier to animate.
Now there are plugins and programs that can rig painterly textures accurately and efficiently. You can even paint on a single flat layer and feed that into AI
to generate something that moves. These things are making it much easier to balance those technical aspects, and allowing more room for super
expressive creativity.
“At the moment, my stance on AI is that, used as a tool to assist human creativity and excellence, it has a place in any digital pipeline. But it’s incredibly important to me that there’s always significant human input.”
04
What are some common challenges you face when working on a project that involves both motion design and illustration, and how do you overcome them?
Time is still a major challenge. While I mentioned AI earlier as something that can allow for faster, more creative freedom, it’s also shifting client expectations around how quickly work can be delivered.
At the moment, my stance on AI is that, used as a tool to assist human creativity and excellence, it has a place in any digital pipeline. But it’s incredibly important to me that there’s always significant human input.
If I were using AI to help animate a complex, detailed illustration, I’d still want someone on my team to have the time and space to create a beautiful illustration by hand. And to do that properly, it always takes time.
We still recommend illustration styles that make sense for the time and budget allowed, and in some cases, that naturally limits the options available. But I’d rather do something simple and well-crafted than overpromise and cut corners.
It’s about balancing efficiency with craft, and setting realistic expectations from the start.
05
What advice would you give to someone who wants
to pursue both motion design and illustration as a career path?
For motion designers, being able to illustrate brings so much more to the table, not just the ability to work in an illustrative style, though that’s the most natural application.
A significant amount of motion design requires illustration, from super literal to abstract. But beyond that, knowing how to illustrate a character in different poses, and having a general sense of anatomy, helps you understand what’s possible when animating,
even with simple rigs that don’t need much
movement.
It also makes you more familiar with composition.
I feel like motion design sits somewhere between graphic design and cinematography (or composition for screen). Being a great graphic designer helps,
but having illustration skills helps to bridge the gap between the two.
When you illustrate, you’re documenting the world—stylised or photoreal—so you’re thinking about what parts make up a whole. How light interacts with a scene, for example. These skills give you a leg up on compositing jobs, and a sense of 3D form helps you become more confident in 3D spaces.
For illustrators, motion is a way to extend your skillset and captivate your audience. The demand for motion is expanding rapidly, and being able to animate your work puts you a cut above the rest.
