Responses by Ilenia Notarangelo, creative director, Illo

Background: To celebrate our seventh birthday as a studio, we decided to organize a big party and an online experience around the theme of prediction. Seven is quite a mystic number, and looking to the last seven years, we wanted to predict what the future of our motion design and communications industry will be in the next seven years and beyond—with an ironically dystopic approach.

Tarot-o-bot is an online experience that predicts your digital future. At the touch of a button, users can trigger the draw of three illustrated, special tarot cards. Tarot-o-bot reads the data beyond the three sacred cards and generates a special, ironic prediction about design, art, tech and creative life.

Favorite details: I think the most important thing is the concept: using fun, revised tarot cards inspired by the world of design agencies and tech to create random predictions. We were inspired by Cards Against Humanity’s approach—without being so mean. On top of this idea, the two main pillars are the quirky copywriting; we created around 100 predictions for random draws of three tarot cards from a deck of 14. The unique tarot designs and animations completely match our style with an additional twist of mysticism.

New skills: We are mainly an animation-driven studio, so beyond the simple web structure, we experimented for the first time with four different types of animation techniques: classical GIFs and embedded MP4s straight from Adobe After Effects; JavaScript, for the particle interactions; CSS that turns the cards and moves them around the screen; and Bodymovin.

Anything else? The Tarot-o-bot web experience formed the heart of other creative initiatives linked to this special milestone for our studio. Using the same designs and cosmic branding, we created printed tarot cards, AR animations and videomapping for guests of our party.