Fifteen years of intro trends that faded

I started in 2010 and I've watched about four supposed revolutions come through. Every one of them was going to make the last one look ancient.

Roughly in order, the big intro trends since 2010 have been preset lens flares, chrome and gold 3D logos from 2012, flat motion graphics once iOS 7 and Material Design landed and generative AI video since early 2024. Each look faded as a fashion. A readable name and a reveal that lands on time never did.

The orders are the odd constant. Someone sends a name and a reference to an opening they grew up with, sometimes with a short line to go under the name. That was true in 2011 and it's true this week.

The flare came with 60 presets

Video Copilot announced Optical Flares for After Effects on 25 January 2010. Read the launch post now and the detail that jumps out isn't the render engine. It's the packaging. The plug-in shipped with 60 presets, a Pro Preset Pack added 50 more and there was a "Preset Network" where people uploaded their own flares for everyone else to grab.

So of course every intro had the same flare. It basically was the same flare (a hundred and ten of them, give or take whatever got shared, passed around by people who'd all watched the same tutorials). You'd drop one across a company name or a gaming channel and it looked expensive for about a year. Then it looked like 2010.

J.J. Abrams had made the look respectable a few months earlier with Star Trek, and he was pretty candid about it at the 2009 press conference. He said he "wanted a visual system that felt unique", admitted some shots went too far ("Oh that's ridiculous, that was too many") and gave the nicest defence anyone's offered for the effect, "I love the idea that the future was so bright it couldn't be contained in the frame", which Gizmodo reported at the time. I like that line a lot. It's the reason the flares work in his films and almost nowhere else, because the light's coming off a sun or a bridge console and the logo sits inside that world instead of having a sparkle glued across it. The Star Trek Into Darkness opening still holds up for exactly that reason. On a random gaming channel the same streak of light has nothing to come from.

Chrome made every name weigh the same

Element 3D came out on 11 July 2012. It let After Effects render real 3D objects in real time, OBJ and C4D models included, which CG Channel covered at launch. Before it, a properly extruded logo meant a trip into a separate 3D package and a long wait. After it, you'd have gold bevels by lunchtime.

So everybody had them. For three or four years, maybe five, a huge share of the intros I saw were chrome letters spinning out of the dark with a reflection sweeping across them. I don't hate it, honestly. A hard sci-fi name in a square typeface carries metal well and I still build that look when it suits. But chrome gives every name the same weight, and a couple's wedding initials and a made-up production company end up looking like siblings.

When someone asks me for a custom video intro made by hand, the first thing I look at is the name itself, how long it is and whether it survives being small on a TV across the room. The finish comes after.

Flat design was the one that stayed

Apple shipped the flat iOS 7 in 2013, and when Google announced Material Design in 2014 Dezeen read it as the end of skeuomorphism. Motion graphics followed the phones, and intros followed the motion graphics a little behind, the way they usually do. Long shadows and big flat colour blocks.

I expected it to date as fast as chrome and it didn't, which took me a while to work out. Flat motion stopped looking like a trend once everyone's apps looked like that, so it went quiet in the background instead of dying, and a company can use it today without anyone reading it as a choice. Lottie helped too (Airbnb open-sourced it in February 2017 and small vector logo animations suddenly ran natively inside apps), though that's more of a product story than an intro one.

AI changed the pitch more than the order

OpenAI showed Sora in February 2024, and its technical report is still a strange, good read. The talk shifted overnight from presets to prompts: type a sentence about the mood you want and get something cinematic back.

I'm not going to pretend that's a fad. Generated video will keep getting better and cheaper. Some work that used to need a person at a workstation won't need one, and fair enough.

What hasn't moved is the request. People still want their name to read when the logo settles and they want the reveal to land on a beat. A home cinema owner wants a different opening for each corner of the library, sort of like a studio running several labels, while a family wants one title that feels made for them specifically and nobody else. A generated clip hands you a hundred surfaces to pick from. It doesn't tell you which letter of the name should catch the light, or how long the mark has to sit still before anyone can actually read it.

The brief keeps pulling things back

The catalogue at Priyansh Animations has grown past 170 styles, and old ones sell next to new ones with very little regard for what's fashionable. Somebody will order a flare-heavy opening this year because it reminds them of a film they loved at fourteen. Why wouldn't they?

Media server owners are the clearest case. They'll often order several intros at once, one for each corner of a Plex or Jellyfin library, and the styles they pick can sit a decade apart in era without anyone minding. Nobody building a home cinema is asking which look is current.

Text is the mistake that survives every era. Too much of it. An intro holds a name and a few words, and once the brief turns into a sentence or two the reveal has to fight the copy (I wrote a whole piece on what people get wrong about the text, since it shows up whichever style someone picks, flare or chrome or prompt).

What fifteen years looks like from here

Each era added a layer instead of wiping the last one out. A flare still suggests scale. Chrome still says big screen, and flat motion still reads as current, which is a bit funny for a style that's been around since 2013. Whether any of it works comes down to the timing and the type around the effect. A bright streak crossing a badly kerned word gives you a badly kerned word with a streak on it.

The Optical Flares launch post is still up on Video Copilot's blog, preset count in the opening lines, dated a January when every one of those 60 flares looked new.