Design Plugin Overview
The Percus Design Plugin bridges the gap between the design tools our team uses and the Percus platform. The first implementation is an Adobe After Effects plugin that allows motion designers to prepare, validate, and upload personalized video templates directly from their design environment — without manual file exports, complex technical steps, or back-and-forth with developers.
Why this exists
In the current workflow, moving a template from After Effects to the platform requires multiple manual steps: exporting files, writing layer mapping documents, testing data injection separately, and coordinating with developers for every change. This creates friction, slows down projects, and is a common source of errors.
The plugin makes this seamless: the designer marks variable layers directly in AE, validates data injection in real time, and publishes to the platform in one click.
Core specification
It describes what the plugin is intended to become. For what the plugin does today, see The panel below. Items not yet built are marked.
1. Smart-Render Ready export
- Exports JSON metadata describing the template structure — not a final rendered video
- The export is designed to be compatible with the client-side render architecture (Percus Player)
- Variable fields, timing, and logic are captured in a format the binding engine can consume
- This approach ensures PII never needs to be sent to a rendering server
2. Personalization & data tools
- Layer-to-API mapping — designers label layers directly in After Effects to mark them as variable (text, image, audio)
- "Programmable Film" logic — define conditional sequences (if/else rules) that determine which scenes play based on data values
- PII tagging — sensitive data fields are flagged so the runtime can apply appropriate security handling
3. AI differentiation (not implemented)
None of the capabilities in this section are built. There is no AI functionality in the plugin today.
- Industry compliance module — AI-assisted checks to ensure content meets financial regulatory requirements
- AI QA assistant — automatically generates test cases and verifies that all variable combinations render correctly before publishing
- Multilingual voiceover — integration with AI voice engines (e.g. ElevenLabs) to generate natural voiceovers in multiple languages and regional accents directly from the AE project
- Content authentication — AI-powered verification that published content has not been tampered with
- AI test case generator — automatically creates representative data sets to stress-test all animation variants
4. Hygiene & usability
- Direct upload to the Percus console without leaving After Effects
- Interactive asset manager (not implemented) — browse and manage platform assets from within the plugin panel
- A/B testing support (not implemented) — define multiple animation variants and tag them for campaign testing
UX / UI design principles
Native AE aesthetic
The plugin UI mirrors the look and feel of Adobe After Effects panels — dark theme, standard panel dimensions, familiar controls — so designers feel at home and adoption friction is minimized.
Visual variable management
- One-click labeling — mark any layer as a variable field with a single click
- Live data preview — inject sample data values to see how the animation looks with real content before publishing
- Variables panel shows all marked layers with their data type and current test value
"Traffic light" QA system
Each variable field is flagged with a status indicator:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 🟢 Green | Field is correctly bound, test data renders cleanly |
| 🟡 Yellow | Field is bound but may have edge cases (e.g. text overflow) |
| 🔴 Red | Field has a binding error or renders incorrectly |
This gives designers immediate visual feedback without needing to run the full render pipeline.
Smart Component Library (nice-to-have)
A curated library of pre-built animation components (intros, data displays, CTAs, outros) that designers can drag into their project and customize — accelerating template creation for common use cases.
One-Click Publish workflow
- Designer marks all variable layers
- Plugin validates bindings and runs AI QA
- Any red/yellow flags are shown with a description
- Designer resolves issues and triggers upload
- Template appears in the Percus platform ready to use
Automatic accessibility
- Closed captions — AI-generated subtitle tracks are created automatically from audio/script data
- Transcript — a text transcript is generated and attached to the template for screen reader support
Designer workflow
After Effects project
└── 1. Mark variable layers (text, image, audio) using the plugin panel
└── 2. Preview with live data — check all variants render correctly
└── 3. Run AI QA — traffic light review of all bindings
└── 4. Resolve any red/yellow flags
└── 5. One-click publish → template appears on Percus platform
Current status
The plugin is built and in production use. Motion designers author, export and publish templates through it today; it is the only supported path from After Effects to a published Percus template.
The After Effects plugin remains the only target environment. Integration with other design tools (Figma, Adobe Premiere) may be considered in later phases based on demand.
The panel
The plugin adds a panel to After Effects with six tabs, following the authoring order.
| Tab | What it does |
|---|---|
| Template | Project settings, render format, and per-layer authoring — selecting a layer and giving it a CTA name, CTA link or other personalization role |
| Data | Declares the data points the template expects, their types and fallbacks, and the expressions that compute derived values |
| Composition Manager | Registers which compositions belong to the template and how they match a viewer, which is what drives variant routing |
| Subtitles | Timed subtitle tracks per locale, and the full-text transcript used as the accessibility alternative |
| Export | Produces the Lottie export from the registered compositions, or reuses an existing export |
| Publish | Selects organization, project and environment, reviews the compositions and bindings that will be sent, and publishes to the platform |
The Publish tab links back into the backoffice so a designer can confirm what arrived.
What the plugin produces
Publishing produces the assets the player consumes, described in the Player manifest reference:
- the Lottie animation and any per-variant animations,
- the background video and audio tracks,
- vectorized font artifacts, so personalized text renders without a runtime webfont,
- the manifest declaring the data schema, computed fields, variant routing rules, interactions and accessibility tracks.
A designer does not write the manifest by hand — the panel's authoring decisions are what generate it.