Animating Logos in After Effects | THE QUICK & EASY METHOD

okay so we've done a lot of logo design tutorials over the years you and I now I think it's fair to say that many of us love the logos that we create for ourselves and our clients but what if we could just go one step further and bring those logos to life with some simple animation like this well that's exactly what we're going to do in this tutorial [Music] hey guys you're watching danske the place to be to develop your creative skills and in this tutorial that is in partnership with nvidia we're gonna jump into

Adobe After Effects and get creative with some logo design animation now remember if you are using a dedicated GPU and that GPU just happens to be in a video card you're gonna be able to squeeze out a little bit more performance from some gpu-accelerated effects but we'll get to all that later in the tutorial and also before we get started a huge thank you to everybody who entered the adobe dimensioned competition honestly there's been so many incredible and inspiring entries like seriously Wow so stick around to the end of the video where we'll be announcing

the winner okie dokie so without further ado let's jump into After Effects and get started righty-o so we're now in After Effects and you can see that I've created a new document now the only thing I've added is a sound effect up here this is like a scratchy sound effect but I'm just gonna use it the end is completely optional and not required to follow along with this tutorial but it's just a nice thing to add at the end once we've created our logo animation so the first thing I'm going to do now is create

a new composition so we can click on this I can give this a name we'll just call it logo now I'm happy with the size 1920 by 1080 framerate here you can go with 30/60 if you want something smoother or even less and this is entirely up to you I'm gonna leave this at 30 for now and the duration well I'm just gonna set this to well go for about 4 seconds I don't think my animation is going to play for much longer than that background color black or good to go click okay and there

you go you can see it takes me to my new composition and if you want to edit that just go up to composition down to composition settings boom there you go okay so for this next bit what you can do is go over to the project panel over here now if you don't see any of these panels that I've got open on my workspace go to window and you can see all of them highlighted that I'm using here so you can customize these drag them around to fully customize your workspace and to import a file

into the project you can double click in the project window here or go up to file and down to import so either way is absolutely fine now for the next bit you can do this with your logo as a PNG on a transparent background so you can just throw an image into after-effects and do it this way however because I have my logo as a font I'm actually going to type mine but again either way is absolutely fine so I'm just going to select the type tool here click and I'm going to type danske so

this is what my logo looks like and then with the main selection tool I'm just gonna scale this up whoa not like that so make sure you do hold shift otherwise it's gonna go all kinds of crazy okay well pop that in the center in fact I can go to the align panel on the right just make sure it is definitely in the center and then I've got the paragraph and character panels here so I can centrally aligned it adjust the tracking if I want to bring those a bit closer together size font weight and

you can see I'm using damn sans there as well so you can adjust all of those properties if you're using a font but if you have your own image what you can do is just import it into the project panel and then just drag it into here or you can drag it down here into the composition panel and it will add it in the center of your main window once you've done that we're going to go over here to effects and presets I'm gonna go down to generate scroll down grab stroke now you can drag

this onto your object here in the window or you can drag this over here onto a specific layer so I'm gonna do that and then you can see the effect controls window pops up here yeah well either pop up here independently or it will be a tab alongside the project window it depends how you've got your workspace set up but remember you can undock it and drag those panels around so for this next bit what I'm gonna do is just zoom in and I'm gonna select all masks and from the color picker just pick a

completely bonkers color we'll go with the lime green why not it doesn't matter what color you pick just pick something nice and bright with a lot of contrast to your design once you've done that go up here to the pen tool and what we're going to do now is pen tool the path that we want our logo reveal effect to follow so I want mine to start here and draw the logo something like this I'm kind of thinking about how I'm gonna have it reveal and then end with the tail or the descender on the

Y bear so let's go ahead and do just that so we'll click maybe go down here back up so I'm just single clicking or left clicking and holding to do curves and going around like this bring it back and then I'm gonna transition over into the a curve there now I don't want to continue this curve anymore so I can hold down alt or option on the keyboard click on this point and it will convert that from a straight line to a curved line just bend it back in position then I can go back down

if you do click off or you deselect anything by mistake just grab that pencil again click on your anchor point where you'd like to pick it up and then continue and you'll notice that the lines I'm drawing are terrible please hold your judgement there is there is a good reason for this and you can always take more time with yours so I'm you can see I'm just bending these in I'm gonna try and do this nice and quickly because there are a few mistakes that you can make very easily in this part of the process

now hopefully I'll get the opportunity in a moment to show you exactly what I mean and how to avoid them so I'm just gonna try and go through this really quickly and crudely don't worry if you completely go outside of the lines once you complete a letter so there we go now as you can see I don't want to continue this curve remember hold alt or option click and what it will let me do then is continue my next point with a straight line so we'll go up here we're gonna go down the K back

up go up to here do the bottom get back do the top and then we're gonna go and do the why and if you don't want to watch this in its entirety feel free to skip forward however I'm telling you this as we are actually done now so anyway there we go we don't need that one so alter option click on those anchor points and remember it will convert it from a straight line to a curve and vice versa so I think there are going to be quite a few mistakes in here and I'll show

you how to rectify that in a moment so if we go back over here we can increase the brush size by clicking and dragging and essentially we want to increase this brush so that it covers all of our letters so you can see there are some white gaps there that will cause a few problems so if I go over here to paint style and change this to reveal original image what I can do now is grab the end or the start either of those I'm gonna grab the end and you can see I can check

the path that I've done and we can do the same with start as well so you can have it going front to back or back to front entirely up to you I'm gonna use end and I can slowly scrub this through and see how this all comes together so if you just look here you can see where the green mask hasn't quite been large enough it's kind of made this bit go a little bit funny a little bit funny over here as well so what I'm gonna do is keep scrubbing through just check how this

animation looks not too bad not too bad so what I can do is if there is a bit that looks a bit wonky is I can scrub to where it is and then I can grab these anchor points and move this around in real time so I can make those changes just to make sure all of my letters are being revealed exactly how I would like them to nothing is overlapping go back to end scrub forward so you can see I can move these points around in real time just to get the look I'm going

for and if I increase the brush size even more you'll see that a lot of those issues that were like this they start to disappear but if I do increase the brush size too much in fact I'll just increase it a lot so you can see sometimes as the animation is playing it will grab parts of other letters that aren't meant to have been drawn yet or other parts of your image depending on the logo you're using of course we want this to play out in a specific and very predetermined way so I'm just gonna

set the brush size back to 30 and press return that seems like a good amount for this particular logo scrub through there we go I'm pretty happy with that so what I'm gonna do now is bring that all the way down to 0% so the logo is completely hidden and we're gonna go down here to the composition panel and expand this down and if I expand down the effects any effects from the effect controls panel up here will also be listed down here and I can add some keyframes to control the animation so I've grabbed

my playhead drag this all the way to the beginning the end is set to zero so I'm gonna add a keyframe here think of keyframe as a marker so if I then move this forward we'll go 15 frames there we go and because my frame rate is 30 frames per second and I set that up in the composition settings at the beginning 15 frames will be half a second and what I can do is then bring this up to a hundred percent so this animation will play for half a second I can scrub this back

to the beginning and press spacebar on the keyboard to play now that's a little bit too quick so what I'm gonna do is just move this keyframe out to the one second marker so 30 frames and then it will play out over a slightly longer duration there we go cool fantastic so it can take a little bit of tinkering just to get everything animating correctly moving those pencil points around you see they look incredibly messy but actually when you play the effect out it looks pretty cool okay so what we're gonna do now is we

are going to use a few GPU accelerated effects so if we go up here well collapse it down we have our effects and presets panel I can go up here to the menu icon click and I can select show GPU capable effects only now all of the effects you're seeing listed here are going to take advantage of that GPU acceleration and your computers just going to have an easier time rendering everything in real time so we've got lots of different ones here now I'm going to use roughing edges so if I just drag this onto

my object over here or in the composition panel you can't see anything because it's hidden but if I drag forward you can see how this looks and I can turn this effect off and on here so depending on your logo or your text you might want to just kind of roughing it up a little bit with something more hand-drawn so we've got roughen we could make it spiky lots of different ones rusty there we go I can rust up my logo now I'm gonna keep it as roughen and the great thing about this panel here

is that you can adjust all of this in real time and see how it looks so I could scale it there you go you could see make the text just wiggle around that's pretty cute like that we can adjust the evolution and the angle so you can just grab all these sliders and you can see you can go you can go quite extreme with this I'm not gonna go too crazy there we go something like this so just roughing it up a little bit around the edges let's just have a look at that in action

so I'm gonna hit play there we go that looks pretty cute I think now another gpu-accelerated effect that I'm going to take advantage of just happens to be up here so we can go to distort and transform and you can see all the gpu-accelerated effects are marked with this icon here so I'm gonna grab transform drop it on to my texts or my logo and I can actually just collapse these other panels here I'm finished with these for now and what I can do is actually go and skew this so you can you can go

very extreme with this and skew it on a particular axes if you want I'm gonna go with something early subtle look over there for minus 10 like that and if I just go here and just zoom the window back out and scrub back to the beginning hit the spacebar you can see we've now added that cutesy rough and edges effect along with skewing it so it's kind of going in an upwards direction so I can screw up this back to the beginning now depending on the complexity of your design your animation your graphic whatever it

is you'll see this green bar here indicates that this is rendered now if you do have a dedicated Nvidia card you're just gonna have a much easier time playing this back in real time and it will handle a lot more complexity all in one go and some of those accelerated effects so we'll just play this one more time and then remember I can go up here I can turn off some of these effects so I could keep this exactly as it was with the drawing animation at the beginning it's definitely a personal preference but I

would encourage you to play around with these effects because they are a lot of fun now at the beginning I had a sound effect so if I just collapse this panel here and drag in that sound effect to the composition panel I can scrub this back to the beginning and in fact I'm just going to expand this back out because I want my animation to play out for the duration of this sound effect now this sound effect is from epidemic sound you can get sound effects from everywhere online even on YouTube and I'm just dragging

this keyframe remember this keyframe here relates to the stroke effect so this is actually the keyframe that determines the length of mana mayshen so there we go I'll go back to the beginning click here to hide all those guides in everything and just press the spacebar and you can see we get that nice little sound effect as if our lettering or our logo is being drawn and it's just a nice little touch the cherry on top of the cake if you will and there we go done so let's have to bring your logo designs to

life with a touch of animation in After Effects and lastly but by no means least the competition so this was for a derby dimension and the challenge was to create something robbed anything really inside of dimension with the goal of being as creative as possible and over a hundred people entered with some quite honestly fantastic work like it was it was so hard to pick a winner you have no idea how stressful this was however it is a competition and there can only be one so I'm excited to announce that the winner is drumroll tim's

loft with this entry here and to be honest this person had some other entries too that were equally as good what really resonated with me personally was how they took their own two-dimensional paintings and integrated them as part of an original 3d scene a scene that also includes floating objects so a huge congratulations Tim sloth I'll reach out to you on Instagram and we can sort out getting you your r-tx 2070 prize and thanks again to everybody who entered the competition and thank you to a video for sponsoring this video so if you do have

any questions or comments you don't to do drop those down below but as always like this video if you enjoyed it and I'll see you next time [Music]