Logo Animation: Here's How You Can Create an Animated Logo

It must have happened to you once in a while. You are sitting in a movie theater, and your favorite movie is about to start. The theater lights go off, and you start seeing logos of studios and production houses on the screen. You found these logos engaging, and remember them on your way home. This is the magic of logo animation! Logo animation is similar to a brand's visual story and is popular now. In this blog, we will dive into what is logo animation and how to make an animated logo.

What is an Animated Logo?

An animated logo is an advanced way of presenting your brand by adding animations and effects to your company logo. Motion designers transform the boring 2D static logos into a highly engaging moving logo that allows a brand to express itself with a great impact.

How to Create Animated Logos?

Here are quick steps to create stunning logo animation with After Effects.

Do Your Research

Before diving into making an animated logo, research is highly essential to create an engaging and impacting logo. Understand the client's business, industry, brand persona, and current static business logo. Do the competitive research, understand what is trending now and how you can use this research to focus on the right animation style for your logo.

Start With Some Rough Sketches

Rough sketches are the best way to have a basic visualization of the character of your logo. To visualize its path, you can sketch the transformation within a logo at a different level. Many rely on pencil and paper, but nowadays, many prefer using digital drawing tabs for tough sketching.

Animate a Static Image

Now it's time to work on a few basic animations and turn the image into a video. Many tools are available to animate your logo, but Adobe After Effects is the best as it offers more control and precision in making animated logo.

To do logo animation with After Effects, you need to import your logo in a PNG format in After Effects. Use the layers option to animate specific parts of your logo. If you want to animate a complete logo, import the complete design without keeping the layers option open. The Effects and Presets will showcase the different types of effects you can add to your logo, such as looping. Go back to your notes and choose the effect that you visualized earlier. You can use the timeline panel to choose your logo animation's starting and ending point. Once finalized, you can render and get the final version of the animated logo.

Set up composition

A component is a container that allows you to overlay, edit, and apply animations to media files. A larger production, such as a movie, will contain several works arranged in the project panel. So you can treat the compositions as a single scene in this movie, and each will have a separate timeline. In our case, a logo animation lasting under five seconds required very little work. If desired, you can convert each of these layers into their own work by right-clicking and choosing Compose first. This will give this layer a separate animation timeline nested within the previous component. And if you wanted to animate the entire logo at once, you would use a timeline linked to the main model.

Finalize with Feedbacks

Logo making is a crucial process, and an animated logo is one of the most challenging types of logo design. You can rectify your thought process, visual appeal, and animation style in a logo by sharing and taking feedback from your colleagues, clients, and friends.

Principles of Logo Animation

Keep the Message Simple

Adding a complicated message in logo animation can distress the viewer and make the result less visible. Try to reduce your idea to a clear message or a group of simple movements. Distinguishing logo animation and making it impactful can be accomplished by refining and applying certain animation principles that I will cover later in this article.

Short and Sweet

Make sure the logo animation is between 1 and 6 seconds long. Most logo animations are ready to use, although the length varies from project to project. Creating animations longer than 6 seconds limits their use and can be overly complex in most cases.

Easing

Objects rarely exhibit linear acceleration and deceleration when creating realistic motion. You should know several types of easing (ease in, ease out, ease in and ease out).

If you're new to After Effects, you might have used the Keyframe Assistant to add basic easing to your animation. The Graph Editor is an essential tool for customizing easing for looks beyond After Effects' default easing. There are endless ways to use this tool.

Arc and Speed

Objects in the physical world move through space with different arcs and speeds. Nothing in nature moves in a straight line. It's important to remember that the faster the speed, the more subtle the arc of the object. Imagine a quick pitch from a professional pitcher. The trajectory of the ball has a minimal arc. Keep this animation principle in mind when animating your logo and mimicking a real-world environment.

Squash and Stretch

When an object transitions from rest to motion very quickly, forces can stretch the object. If you move very fast and stop abruptly, you can get crushed. The amount depends on the elasticity and density of the object. It's also a great mechanism for applying the desired level of playfulness to your animation.

Staging

Staging is the overall representation of an object within an animation. Staging is essential in any logo animation to grab the viewer's attention and help them understand the animation. When many objects are moving at the same time, the animation can feel disorganized and frantic, losing the overall message. When objects collide with each other or are animated, the animation can feel messy and immature. When done correctly, the message or concept is clearly conveyed to the audience as intended.

Also Read: Beginners Guide to Logo Designing

Conclusion

Logo animation with After Effects is certainly quite challenging for a few, but it's quite a fun and interesting process. ProAlley offers Adobe After Effects Essentials Course to help you learn the After Effects in detail and master the process of creating awesome logo animations.

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