How To Animate A Business Logo Step By Step Guide

Eye-catching animated logos help businesses to increase their reach and brand awareness. Because once they are seen, then it is hard to forget them. Animated logos are more common these days. You can encounter logos everywhere, from smartphones to the advancement. Animated logos give more room to visual effects such as animation that are impossible with physical products or items. More popularity of animated logos means more competition. So, in this article, we will show you how to take your logo animation to the next level with the help of this step-by-step guide of business logo animation.

How To Animate A Business Logo In Six Step

1.     Know Your Clients And Do Market Research

Knowing your clients’ and customers’ business is the first thing to do. Because the logo specifies the business objective. So, knowing your clients and their business is important for creating an attractive and effective logo that specifies the goals of clients’ businesses. The main goal of this step is to get to know clients or customers fields better to ensure that you and your designs work for them effectively.

 After getting the information about your clients’ business, start the market research and find out their competitors. So, you can differentiate the clients’ company logo from its competitors. Stepping yourself in the customers’ place and further analyzing the market will help you steer your creativity, and you will avoid the mistake of designing a similar logo to their competitors. You can also take the help of a 2D animation service provider to get more creative design ideas for the business logo.

2.    Preparing Logo For Animation

 In the next step, we will begin designing our logo animation in Adobe Illustrator. You can also use other logo design software if you don’t want to use Adobe Illustrator. Take your time to think about how you want to design and animate your clients’ business logos. You can start grouping or ungrouping parts of the logo that you want to be together or not in the logo animation. This is to make sure that the logo file is set up properly for Animations. While working with animation software, make sure logo source files should be in vector format. So, they can be altered without losing their image quality, and it will also be useful when working with shape layers.

 While designing the logo it’s better to layer the logo rather than group it into a single piece. With this, you can create a more complex animation design by animating different parts of the logo separately. After completing the layers, the next step is setting up RGB colors. If your logo file is set to CMYK, you can change it by navigating to Edit > Edit Colors > Convert to RGB.

3.    Importing Logo File To After Effects And Setting Up Compositions

 You can import the logo files from the illustrator into After Effects to maintain the same layers that you have created in Illustrator. they will automatically update in After Effects If you do any changes to the logo file. You don’t have to re-import these files. To import the logo file, you can simply drag and drop your required logo file into the Project panel, or you can navigate to File > Import > File. You can choose to import the media Merged Layers or footage.

 After importing the files, the next step is to set up the compositions. Compositions are containers that let you edit, layer, and embed animations to media files. Here we will only discuss the optimal settings for compositions of motion graphics, the aspect ratio, and frame rate to match your main video composition. A larger production like a film or movie contains multiple properly arranged compositions in the Project panel. So, think of compositions as a single scene within that film or movie, and each composition will have its different timeline. A logo animation that is less than a few seconds needs very few compositions.

4.    Animation With Keyframes

Most of the animation software works using keyframes. Keyframes are markers that can be set along the timeline to get the idea about your logo animations’ starting and ending states.

There are different kinds of keyframes that are used in After Effects to animate the position, scale, and rotation settings on layers. With keyframe,  you can customize the preinstalled animation file, or you can create your new animation.

While designing the logo animation, it is better to work in reverse. Since the animation is supposed to end with a complete logo. So, you need to create keyframes before you do any changes. It will give you snaps of the attribute values in their default state. After that, you can move these keyframes out to your desired endpoint on the timeline and create new keyframes for changes at the start state of the timeline.

5.    Animating Masks And Shape Layers

 When designing a logo you can also use simple shapes to create masks on solid background compositions. You can fill out these masks with different graphic layers. These masks are also used to create and animate their position to reveal text and graphics for a smoother and more professional look.

 

Shape layers are used to design creative and artistic animations. They are objects that contain pathing information, such as connecting lines and anchor points and connecting lines, and manipulating these shape layers gives you the freedom to animate the animation according to your need or desire.

6.    Export Your Animated Logo

After completing the masking and shape layers, you are ready to export your designed animated logo. To export your animated logo, navigate to File > Export > Add to Adobe Media Encoder queue. After this, After Effects will export a default mp4 file which is great for video. If you want to make a shareable image file of logo animation, You can export it as an animated GIF.