How can you make an animated logo?

David Echor
4 min readMay 1, 2021

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Creating an animated logo is one of the trends that businesses wish to participate in. In this digital age, everyone is either on their phone or the internet browsing something. So, are you aiming to be one of the firms that have a commercial with the animated logo or someone who will be forgotten?

The thing about animating your company logo is that there are much different software available for doing just that. However, animating may seem to be a daunting task since you would be able to use tools that you are unfamiliar with.

As a result, you will be able to learn about the method of designing your logo here. The procedure entails:

1. Logo File:

This is the first step in your journey, which begins with locating or using an Adobe Illustrator (AI) file. If you don’t have one, make one from scratch or find a design to practise on. The benefit of AI files is that they do not degrade in quality.

Check two different items, one of which is the colour. Illustrator offers you the choice of using CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Key) or RGB (Red, Green, Blue). RGB would be used here because it is an ideal choice for advertisement.

The second step is to ensure that every entity is layered. The explanation for this is that when an image is exported, each object can be animated in its unique way. It’s up to you whether to layer a sentence or each object separately.

2. Exporting it to After Effects:

After Effects is the Adobe software used for animation. It is a 2D and 3D animator; you just need to understand how it works. If you want to import a file, you don’t have to convert it to .aep because it can also import .ai files.

Importing is a quick process; simply click file-import and pick the file you want to import, and it will appear in your project bar. When you double-click it, the file will appear on the timeline.

This is where you will be able to see all of the different layers. It is now up to you if you want to pick and animate all of them or do it one at a time. If you want to combine them, simply right-click on the file and choose pre-compose.

3. Using keyframes:

In After Effects the process of animating is done through keyframes. Keyframes are triangular-shaped indicators that indicate whether there is a thing that will be changing at a certain point in time.

If you’ve ever used Photoshop, you’ll notice that many of the effects are identical. Similar ones include filling in shapes, mirroring images, fading in and out, and a few others.

One effect you can attempt is Fade in or Fade out, which allows you to play with the opacity option, which can be found in the timeline’s transform option. One thing you can notice is that fps is short for frame per second.

4. Different transform options:

Aside from opacity, the application comes with three different options for you to use. Place, Scale, and Rotation are the various options. There is also the choice to use all of them at the same time.

They function exactly work as they sound, allowing you to adjust the position of an object, scale it big to small, or rotate it. Let’s take a look at how this they can be used:

Position:

You can alter this object by moving it around the X or Y axes. These two act the same way as shown on the graph; if you move the emblem with the x-axis, it will move horizontally, while moving it using the y axis will cause it to move vertically.

Scale:

Using the scale allows you to adjust the height of your buy social logo. Changing the scale is a technique used by many companies to draw the viewer’s attention to a certain item.

Rotation:

You’re just revolving around an object here, but the way x and y function are different. Using x causes the object to turn to the left while using y causes it to turn to the right. If you want to create something using this technique try using it on a wheel.

5. Exporting the file:

If you’ve finished creating the animation, it’s time to export it. After Effects has a few different ways for exporting the animation. If you are looking to get it quick using Adobe’s Media Encoder is something you should be trying.

Adobe Media Encoder is a separate software that will be downloaded automatically through Creative Cloud. There are many advantages of using the encoder since it has a variety of file formats.

If you’ve created a complete film, export it in Mp4 format is the best option; if you’ve created a short minute animation, choose Animated GIF. You can also adjust the file output to specify where you want the custom logo design saved.

Wrapping Up:

This is what attracts so many people to this process, as these little Gifs can be used everywhere, such as Facebook, Instagram, or even Twitter. Aside from that, the whole process of creating an animated tag is so much fun that it doesn’t matter how experienced you are.

This is the whole procedure for developing a moving tag. If you want to make one, make sure to practise as much as possible because designing something perfect would require you to keep trying. Another choice is to hire a logo order online to build one for you.

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