Innovation Fridays in Action

Here at Click Here Labs, we created Innovation Fridays to give our team intentional space to experiment, explore emerging technologies, and push beyond the boundaries of day-to-day client work. Early Innovation Friday sessions sparked excitement around interactive animation, gaming concepts, and real-time motion design, revealing a bigger opportunity: rethinking how animation and development could work together to create more immersive digital experiences. Traditionally, these disciplines operated in parallel. Innovation Fridays gave us the space to break down those silos and explore what becomes possible when designers and developers collaborate from the start. 

As those experiments gained momentum, we identified an opportunity to apply our discoveries to a tangible internal project. The interactive holiday card became a natural extension of that work, not as a seasonal deliverable but as a focused execution that allowed us to bring months of experimentation into a single, cohesive experience. 

As momentum grew, Innovation Fridays evolved into focused weekly working sessions that allowed us to consistently test ideas, share discoveries, and build on one another’s progress. We leaned into Rive, an emerging real-time interactive animation platform, as a way to bridge motion design and development. Through hands-on experimentation, we explored interactive characters, state-driven animations, data binding, and modular animation systems designed to scale across digital experiences.

When it came time to execute the interactive card, we approached it as a culmination of that ongoing work rather than as a one-off concept. Many of the animations, interactions, and technical patterns had already been explored and refined through Innovation Friday prototypes. These components were then connected and expanded into a unified interactive experience. To support deeper collaboration, we also built internal tools, including a custom Rive debugging and validation system that gave our designers and developers shared visibility into animation logic and states. These tools reduced friction, accelerated iteration, and created a common language across disciplines.

The final experience proved that Innovation Fridays are more than a creative exercise, they’re a catalyst for real, production-ready capabilities. We delivered a fully interactive, web-based experience built entirely from experimental work, strengthened collaboration between our motion and development teams, and successfully integrated Rive as a core interactive animation tool within our workflow. 

More importantly, the knowledge, systems, and processes developed through this project are already being applied to client work. The same interactive animation techniques, data-driven motion systems, and cross-disciplinary workflows have been used to elevate live digital experiences, allowing us to bring a higher level of interactivity and storytelling to real-world engagements. What started as experimentation has quickly become execution. 

With these capabilities in place, the opportunities are expansive. From immersive websites and interactive brand moments to scalable animation systems and custom digital experiences, this work has unlocked new ways for us to create, collaborate, and innovate, demonstrating how Click Here Labs turns exploration into impact and ideas into lasting value.