Digital Tutors – Creating an Animated Typeface in After Effects

In this series of tutorials, we will learn the steps for creating an animated typeface. We learn a lot at the beginning of the course on how to take the freshly designed typeface in Illustrator, and prepare it for animation in After Effects. This is one of the most valuable parts of the course, because knowing how to properly prepare your files will save lots of time in the end.

Once we move into After Effects, we use several effects that are unique to shape layers, as well as a few standard transform style animations. We learn how to animate small details of the typeface ahead of time, so that they can be quickly swapped out for the still layers to make for even faster production. While we don’t animate every single letter of the alphabet together, we learn all the techniques for creating beautifully animated letters which we then place in a composition. To top it all off, we end the training by learning how to render for, then create, an animated GIF of our type.

By the end of this tutorial, you will know lots of tricks for saving time as you work through animating a typeface and you’ll be ready to implement these techniques the next time you need some type in motion.

1. Introduction and project overview01:16
2. Preparing the artboards09:17
3. Using a script to separate the paths06:44
4. Saving and renaming each individual artboard file06:34
5. Importing and organizing in After Effects08:41
6. Reducing the project02:27
7. Animating the half hoop06:03
8. Animating the circle03:11
9. Animating the sideline02:29
10. Animating the down line and the letter X07:38
11. Using Trim Paths for the letter Y03:53
12. Replacing the repetitive shapes to save time02:56
13. Using Scale and Rotation for the letter X07:38
14. Using Wiggle Paths for the letter K07:06
15. Using Pucker and Bloat04:58
16. Moving and keying the path10:07
17. Placing multiple letters in a composition04:48
18. Using the Align Panel with the letter compositions08:27
19. Animating the Position Property for the letters07:49
20. Adding color and a slow scale04:10
21. Rendering for a GIF04:13
22. Making a GIF in Photoshop05:12