Graphic Design: Explore Typography through Animated Music Posters

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] You ever sometimes feel like you're stuck in a rut. A need to be inspired. The fresh eye. Well, you're not alone. While traveling isn't accessible to everyone right now, this is when I turn to music. Music has been a part of my everyday life. Whether it's walking down the street, or part of my dance journey, or a way to quiet my mind when I'm working. I thought to myself what would happen if I bring two things that I love together, music and typography. I started experimenting with these typographic music posters about three years ago. I probably made about 50 of them. I even had some of them selected to be on display in an open call exhibition for poster design. I have a couple of them hung up right here behind me in my creative space. Hey guys, I'm Khadija, but everybody calls me Dija. I'm a top teacher here on Skillshare and a freelance graphic designer based in Cairo, Egypt. I've been working in the field for five years now specializing in branding and packaging design. In this class, I'll be teaching you how to create one of these typographic music posters and even how I animate them. We'll be covering what song to pick and looking at some helpful poster examples. Then pulling out some references into the mood board to help us lock-in our main direction. Jumping into this design where I'll be showing you some basic tools on Illustrator to achieve this. Then learning how to add some final touches to your poster on Photoshop and prepare your file for animation. This class is perfect for anyone who has a basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects. But no worries if you're a total beginner in After Effects, I'll show you how to do a very simple animation step-by-step as I am personally completely self-taught in that program. For your class projects, you'll have the chance to recreate and reinterpret the song that I chose for today's poster. Or you can choose a song of your own and create your own poster for it. By the end of this class, you would have learned the basic skills of manipulating and experimenting with typography, adding textures and masking on Photoshop, and the know-how to begin your friendly animation on After Effects. You can later apply these skills to any of your graphic design projects to level them up and experiment, like I did. This class is fun, quick, and short, but it's also very important. I believe it's important as a designer to just sometimes step aside, take a break, do something for fun, do something crazy, something to experiment with and something to just expand your imagination. Take this class as an opportunity to regularly exercise your creative mind. You'll find that it'll help inspire you later on in your work and add some flair and personality to your portfolio. Grab your playlist, your headphones, and let's get started. 2. Pick a Song: [MUSIC] We're starting off with what may be the funniest part of the whole class and that's picking the song. When I'm about to create any of these posters, I spent a bit of time looking through my playlists or even discovering new songs. What I'm looking for is a striking song title that I can envision a visual striking interpretation for it in my head. Sometimes it's a song title, sometimes it's a one-line lyric from a song, it just depends. [MUSIC] I just want to go through a couple of my previous posters as examples of how you can go about this and just my personal approach on how I pick a certain song title and I transform that into something visual. The first poster here is called Mess by Noah Kahan. It's a very simple idea as you can see. But because when I first heard the song which I absolutely love when I first saw the song title, and I thought of the four letters because it's a short song title. I felt there's a lot to work with that. I wanted to create this huge random mess with these four letters but it's still a calculated mess if you will. I made sure that I picked a very neutral sans serif, but yet bold chunky font. But I didn't want a font that had a lot of bits and bobs over here because I knew that I was going to duplicate so many of these letters. I just wanted to make sure the font is so simple and let the idea speak for itself. But I still wanted the font to have some personality. I liked this condensed but yet wide style. I think that also helped with the overall image of the poster. As for the colors, I just made sure that most of them are neutral monochromatic tones. But yet you have this pop of yellow come about in certain quarters in areas of the poster that really balances things out. Then I wanted to write the song name just Mess and Noah Kahan is seeking through the letters so they're just not slapped on the poster. They're also a part of the mess underneath the S, underneath the M peeking through. That was the overall idea. I like how the letters look like typography, but they can also look like objects from afar. That was also the idea when picking the typeface for this, I just wanted something that was bold enough and didn't look typically like a letter from afar, than obviously up-close it tests. Yeah, I just did this very simple animation for it. Super simple, it was not even done on after effects it was done on Photoshop, but I just wanted to show you a very simple way of how you can convey your idea with something like this. [NOISE] That's it. I think having sound in this particular poster helped as a way to envision these little bits and bobs dropping, and then making this huge mess in the end. It's super simple. Nothing too crazy about it, I think it just depends on your song and your poster, what your approach is, and then that will assess the animation idea for it. Moving on, the second poster is called Invisible by Zara Larsson. I also wanted to convey this idea or concept of invisibility by playing around with the letters extruding from the poster and then going back again into a blank canvas, if you will. It's just as simple as that. This was actually done on Cinema 4D because I was just experimenting with the program. But you could easily achieve something like this on Illustrator using the 3D or extrude option, or you can do it on illustrator, then shade it on Photoshop and animate it later on after effects. There are tons of ways you can do this. That was the idea, super simple. The next one is The Less I Know The Better by Tame Impala. For this poster, I wanted to really strip it down and keep it so simple. No animation, no illustration, nothing extra as just pure type that reflects the meaning of the song. I wanted to choose a typeface that was slab serif for this specific poster because I knew I was going to be cutting up parts of the word to decrease with less and then reappear again with better. Slab serif is perfect for this because you have these bars of the letters and the legs and the feet and everything. I think that worked better with slab than sans serif. That could also work with a serif font, but I just went for a slab serif as I knew it would fit the overall vibe of the poster better. The idea that I got for this is listening to the song. I had a lot of ideas of how I could convey that meaning and actually had so many trials before in this poster of adding too much and then making the entire word disappear and then adding illustrations and making it crazy. But sometimes in certain song titles, you realize that really the less you do, the more. I just sat down and figure it out how can I convey this meaning in a much more simpler way. I realized that I could just keep removing parts of the letters by the less I know the better and just have better fully legible at the last line and seeing it at the last line and then seeing it just situated [LAUGHTER] above it, you understand this is called better and same for no as well. But yeah, you get the idea when you see the poster. But this was my thought process when I was designing it, and I just wanted to show you three different posters, a minimal one and something that was more on the fun, simple, experimental but maximalist stick side. Then something in the middle between both of them. It's minimal, but also it has a little bit of an interesting animation approach. Yeah, I'm definitely going to be uploading all of my posters for your reference later down below so you can go through them and they're pretty self-explanatory, but they will act like a guide for you to help you when you're thinking, what do I do? What can I do with this song? I think that will help a lot. The song I picked out for today's poster is Fix You by Coldplay. Funnily enough, I actually designed a poster for the same exact song. I think about a couple of years ago or three years ago maybe, and this time actually I used a part of the lyrics and not the song title. Just want to show you what that looked like. [MUSIC] Yeah that's it. I use part of the lyrics that said, lights will guide you home. For this specific poster, I needed to use illustration to help me convey that idea. Now that I even look at it, there are so many ways that you can recreate this using just typography or using illustration to help you or animation. I think even me as designing this poster three years ago, I can re-interpret this a lot differently today than I did three years ago. I think that's the most interesting part about it. But yeah, when I came to design this, I wanted to draw the type as a shadow. I just typed in these lyrics. Then I played around with their perspective on Photoshop and the opacity. I actually animated this again on Photoshop. This is just all sequence layers basically and super simple. I just wanted to create this movement with the light because the lyric say, lights will guide you home. I just wanted to create this movement, and not have a static light only. I thought a street lamp post was most appropriate to convey that as there are several street lamp posts when you're walking down the street and they're all guiding you towards a specific direction. Not to get too philosophical over here, but I think to each their own, and everyone has different way of interpreting songs. I think the key exercise here is tap into your imagination. Everyone has a specific way of interpreting something so subjective like music. That's the best part about it, I think because when you don't have certain restrictions of right or wrong or yes or no, your imagination tempts to just go wild and that's perfect. That's the raw material that we want to use to be able to transform certain word into a visual. This is my approach to transforming Lights Will Guide You Home using these keywords as a way to transform it into a visual language. Same for invisible as you saw earlier or less, these certain keywords, they pop off. If I asked you to recreate what these words mean to you, what the song means to you, your mind will automatically have a certain visual pop in your mind. This class is just a way to hone in this imagination and use certain tools and tips and resources to bring that idea to life. I think the sweet spot as defined song title that's short enough so you can have enough room to play with a type without cramming all the letters and the words in your poster. But also something meaningful enough to be able to produce an interesting visual for. I already have an idea in my head of how I want this to look like and that's how it always starts. I just have a light bulb [NOISE] light up when I see a certain song title, but I would need some visual mood board to help me lock in exactly what I'll do. That's something I deeply recommend before starting the poster is just some gather some visual references for you to be inspired by, to know what style you want to go for, and help you really imagine it in your mind. That's what we're going to do in the next lesson. 3. References & Moodboard: [MUSIC] The idea I have in my head for this poster is a little bit inspired by the movie Argo, if you've seen it. There's a scene in the movie where they're trying to connect the identity of the hostages by putting together paper shreds of their faces. Me interpreting that, I want to use the song title "Fix You" by shredding the type into long pieces of paper and then have it look like someone is fixing them by putting them back together, if that makes sense. The best thing about these music posters is that their interpretation is entirely up to you. There's no right or wrong. Your interpretation could be different to mine, and honestly, that's the best thing about music. There's something in it for everyone, don't you think? With that said, I want to hop onto Pinterest for a quick minute and start gathering references for my poster. I want to start off by typing "paper shred art". I know this is a popular craft, so I'm just hoping to find something that's visually striking to help inspire me, maybe. [MUSIC] I also want to try typing "paper shred typography" just to see if anyone's toyed with this idea before, and that could help me visualize what that would typically look like. [MUSIC] This is what I came up with when I went through Pinterest and I just pulled out as many references as I can to reflect the idea that I have in mind. What I have in mind is exactly like the reference in the middle here, where I would cut up the type, very, very simple type toys and cut it up into these shreds where they become visible, separate paper shreds, if you will. Then I'm imagining that I want it to be really colorful, like the colorful references over here. I like really the idea of having it, each paper shred like a pop of color somehow, and then they would animate and move in together and formulate the word at the end. This interpretation is completely subjective and it's up to everyone and how they feel about a certain song and how their mind conveys that into a visual composition. This is just my visual interpretation and I think what really helped me from the beginning is that movie reference. That just gave me a very clear guide on what to look for. Your references don't have to come directly from Pinterest or the Internet. It can be a movie you saw, can be a park you went to, can be another song you heard. It can be from a book cover you saw. The sky is really the limit. Yeah, I think I'm just ready to take this mood board and start designing my poster. [MUSIC] 4. Design Your Poster: [MUSIC] Now that I've picked my song, and in my case, it's the song title and not a part of the lyrics, now I can start designing my poster. I always want to make sure that my mood board is somewhere next to me, either printed or opened in another window. Just something that has quick access so I can always refresh my mind, and I can always refer back to it. You want to jump into Illustrator and make new file, and we just want to set the music poster into an A4 size. So that's 21 centimeters by 21.7 or millimeters, whichever you feel comfortable working in, and just rename it to whatever you want to name it. I'm just going to name it music poster for now, and click "Enter", and here go, we have our artboard ready. The first thing that I want to do is just work in black and white, and then we're going to add color later. But as I always say in all of my other classes, working black and white is so important just because you can see the skeleton of whatever you're designing, and then adding color later will really bring it out, so that's what you want to start out with first. Now, my song title is Fix You, so the first thing that I want to do is just type out the word right now. I'm just going to go to Type, convert to point type, and really make this thick, and then I'm just going to go to Command T, it's going to bring me the Character panel, and I'm just going to pick a random font, just a nice neutral bold font, like maybe Impact. I don't really like to stress on the font choice, especially with music posters and typography because you're going to manipulate the font anyways, so it doesn't really matter which font you use just as long as it's a good base. I always like to start with something that's neutral, bold, and it's easy to work with. What I want to do is start taking each character, each letter, and start relaying it out on my poster, and I want it to really fill out the entire poster. I'm just going to break this apart right now. Then I want to start out by playing with the sizes maybe. I'm just going to play around with each letter. Maybe play around with the scale, move it up a bit, move it below it until the letters fit the poster in a well-balanced way and then we'll move on to the next step. For example, I want to bring up the U a little bit here so what I'm going to do is just going to press A, and then select a half top part of the U, and then just press Shift and drag it up with my top arrow, so bars of the U can really keep going up and fill that space for me without distorting the bottom part of the U. You watched what I did right there, and it's just all basically pulling anchor points, pulling them up, pulling them down, making letters a bit thick, playing around with the proportions, the ratios. Don't be afraid to really go crazy, you're creating an experimental typographic poster. It's meant to really expand, stretch your imagination, so break the rules if you will. It's meant to really push your boundaries and really test what you can do with this. This is what I wanted to do, is just basically fit all of these letters, space them out, squeeze them in, tighten all the spaces until I reach something that I like, and it looks like one cohesive block, if you will. There's so many ways you can do this, you don't have to do this approach only, but for the sake of this class, I'm showing you what I'm doing with today's song title. Now I'm going to move on to the next step where I'm going to start shredding these letters and basically moving them around as if someone's trying to put the pieces back together and fix them. What I want to do is, I want to take a copy of my artboard so I can go back to the original step if I need to, but always make a copy of everything just so you don't lose your work, and of course save your work. What I want to do now is I'm going to go to my Line Segment tool here, and I'm going to draw a line but I won't have any stroke color to it. I'm just going to copy this line and moving it around just a little bit, there, and I'm just going to press Command D and it's going to repeat those shreds of lines all across. You want to group all of the little stroke lines, and then select all, and then go to Pathfinder and press "Divide", and that's just going to cut up everything up into these little shreds. Now you want to ungroup them, and as you can see, they're now individual little shreds of lines. I'm just going to make the size of this a little bit smaller because when we move the lines up and down, and here and there, it's going to hit the corners. I think that's good for now. Let's just play and see. I'm going to experiment right here with you. If I move this line a bit up, and this one a little bit down, and just start playing around with how these lines formulates. Somehow, this is okay with me for the time being, and now I just want to start adding some color to it. I'm just going to create like I have color palette here and see what we can play with. I'm thinking, I want it to be really colorful just so these lines can really standout, and the background can be a little bit darker so the colors can pop out. Now that I've shredded the pieces, what I'm trying to do now is just make sure there's a fine line between it looking like a cool poster, but it not being legible. Right now I'm just trying to space out the letters little bit, maybe play around with the lines just so Fix You can still be legible, maybe not at first glance, but when you look at it really closely. That's the goal I'm trying to achieve. I'm just going to keep playing around with these lines until I reach a result that I really like. I just play around with the colors, and I think I like this color combo more than this, and it's more legible this way, and I just want to show you that trick because it will save you a lot of time. If you want to change colors and see what it looks like without having to select all of them, you just want to group this poster for example, and then click on it, go to Edit Colors, Recolor Artwork. Then you have all the colors in the selection that you've made, and you just can click on something and then play around with the colors and see what they look like, or rearrange the colors. If you want the orange to be instead of the red, you can rearrange them until you like how it looks. This is just a much faster and more efficient way than selecting each color and then seeing what they look like. I think I like this option a lot more than this one. I think the high contrast here is making it a little bit harder to read. When I spaced out the letters a little bit, it did show a lot more, but I just want to play around with it a little bit more. Maybe refine it a little bit, tweak it here and there, and then we can move on to the next part. I like this composition so far, and then just give it a little bit of kick and spice. I just want to add little bit of pieces of paper that are just flying about here as if they were cut off with the rest. I'm just going to place them randomly all over. Now that you're happy with what you have here, what I want to do is write the song title, and the artist's name, and we're going to put that in there. I want it to be in a very neutral font, just so it doesn't clash with everything else , and there we go. I like that it looks like paper shreds at first, but when you look closely, you'll find the words fix and you, and it does fit well with how I interpreted it in the beginning of how someone is trying to put pieces together. You can stop here and be very proud of yourself that you just created this beautiful still typographic music poster. I remember I did so many still posters before I could learn how to animate them, so that's perfectly fine. However, if you're eager to learn how to animate it, or you're primarily well-versed in After Effects and you're comfortable using it, then I'll show you in the next lesson how to prepare your file for After Effects, and how to add some final touches here and there to add some flair and personality to the poster. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Prepare Your File: [MUSIC] Already right, so this is where we left off from our last lesson. Now I want to show you how to prepare your file for After Effects. After Effects works with layers and right now our illustrator file is all into one combined layer here. What we want to do is copy and paste each of these paper shreds into an individual layer so we can be able to move them, play around with them and do everything with them. I'm going to start with my background here's just like that. Then cut it out, command X and then go down here, create new layer and paste that in its place so "Shift, command, V" and just drag it below. There we go. Then I want to take one of the paper shreds here, "Command X" onto a new layer, paste in its place and simple as that. I'm just going to repeat that for all the other layers until we have every single thing in its own separate layer. That's pretty much it. As you can see everything now is on its own individual layer and that's just going to make our lives so much easier. I just renamed the layers for a fix you, Coldplay, and my background as BG just so I can find them easily when I'm animating. There's one final step, I just want to export this to Photoshop because I want to add some paper texture to these paper shreds and some shadows beneath them just to make it look a bit more realistic, make it look a bit more interesting, have some dimension and complexity to it. But you don't have to do this step. You can just export this straight onto After Effects if you'd like, depending on your poster, but this is what I want to do in my case. I'm just going to go to File, Export, Export as, and I'm just going to leave it named as it is and for the format I'm just going to choose Photoshop and export. Make sure it's clicked on right layers not flat image so it can preserve all of our layers here and click "Okay". That's it. You want to open your Photoshop file that we saved from Illustrator and you want to grab any paper texture like this. I just typed in on Google, free paper texture and this is what came up there. Tons like this online. No problem. Now, what I want to do is I want to mask this paper texture onto these letters and there's a very easy way to do this if this were a still poster and that's just to copy all of your layers over here and paste them, and group those and then merge them. Then you'd just click on the "Paper texture" and select this layer over here, the Group 1 by clicking Command and then pressing on this Window and then just mask it from here and then click "Linear burn" and that's it. However, because we're animating this, I want the paper texture to be individually linked to each paper shred. This is perfect for still poster, but if we want to animate it, we're going to do a little bit of a tedious task over here by individually linking or masking this texture onto each layer. This is how we're going to do that. I'm just going to copy and paste my paper texture and bring it down to the first layer that I have here, Layer 56. I'm going to hide the copied one on top. I'm going to select my paper texture and then command select the layer beneath it, which is this guy right here. Then I'm going to click "Add layer mask" and that's going to mask this guy over here. I want to select both of these layers so the paper texture layer and the original vector file layer, select both of those, right-click and then click "Merge layers" That's just going to be one combined layer, my vector layer, and my paper texture layer. Then I want to add some shadows to it so I'm just going to go to add layer style down at fx and click "Drop shadow". I want to select the color of the drop shadow as close as possible to the background color just so it can look like it popped off of the background. I'm just going to make it a bit darker and play around with the distance and the spread and that's it. You have one combined layer of the paper texture, the vector, and the shadow. I'm just going to repeat this process all throughout all these layers. But for the effects, I can just right-click and click "Copy Layer Style" and then if I were to go to the layer underneath, which is this guy right here, I'd right-click "Paste Layer Style", and I'd have the exact shadow properties as the one above it. I'm just going to repeat this step for all these layers and have these individual paper textures and shadows for all of them and then they'd be ready for animation on After Effects. That's pretty much it. You see how that added a lot more complexity and realism to the poster. This is just something super simple and easy you can do to level up your poster designs. Now each one of these layers are individually selected, and they're good to go for After Effects to animate them individually. I'm just going to save this and I'll see you in After Effects. 6. Animate Your Poster: You want to go ahead and open Adobe After Effects. This is the first thing that you're going to see. What you want to do is press "Command I" to import your file. You want to import it as composition-retain layer sizes, and that's just going to retain all the layers that we did on Photoshop. Then make sure it's clicked on editable layer styles, and click "Okay". Then you want to just double-click on where it says composition next to it. It's just going to come up in your timeline here down below. You want to go to the View and just click "Fit" so you can see everything. Now, right now, my composition is set to eight seconds, which is a good duration. If I need to change it later, I could just go to Composition, Composition Settings, and you could just enter the number of seconds you want to as duration. But I'm going to keep it at eight seconds for now. My idea for this composition is that I want all these papers shreds to start in the middle, overlapped and stacked like a messy mess. Then spread out to the edges and then come back into the middle and then spread out to the where the word is going to formulate in the end, so as if someone is looking through shreds of paper trying to find the right one to put together and whatnot. The basic techniques that I'm going to show you today is just playing around with keyframes of positions and rotations. We're just going to change their positions and rotate the pieces so they're not perfectly straight all the time. The first thing that I'm going to do is take my playhead here and place it all the way at the eighth second where I want the animation to end at. I want this to be the final result. Then I'm going to take my layers here. I'm going to store it at this one over here and go all the way at the end, press "Shift" and have them all selected. Then I'm going to hit a shortcut on my keyboard for P, P for position. Then just click on the stopwatch at any layer. That's just going to put keyframes on all my layers here at the eighth second, telling it this is where I want it to end at. Then I'm going to do the same thing, but this time I'm going to press "R" for rotation and just click on the stopwatch. This also tells us this is what I want the rotation to end at. Then I'm going to take my playhead all the way to the beginning now where I'm going to start to mess them up and bring them all to the middle. While they're all selected, I'm just going to press "P" again and then click "Out", so I can de-select all the layers. I'm going to go to my first layer over here, which is this guy over here. There we go. I wanted to start in the middle of the poster. While I'm pressing the layer, I'm just going to drag it out to the middle. Then if I want to change its rotation and not have it at its exact rotation here, I'm just going to press "R" and where it has the property for the degrees, I'm just going to change the rotation and make it a little bit slanted like that. I'm just going to move on and do the same exact thing for all the layers. My second layer here is the long blue shred of paper on the very right here. If I drag it to the middle and then press "R" and rotate it a little bit and press my stopwatch, I'm just going to make my resolution to a quarter, not full, just so this can easily preview quicker because this is quite a heavy file and we don't need to see it at full resolution right now. If I press my spacebar right now just to preview what happens when I place those keyframes, this is what it's going to look like. That's just the gist of the animation. We're just going to keep repeating these steps for all of the layers here, just putting them all in the middle first and then having them span out till the very end where it originally looks like. I'm just going to go ahead and do that. That's basically it. As you can see, just they all start out messy, just to them randomly, kept rotating, kept changing positions until it looks like a nice random mess, if you will. Then they just overlap each other until they get to the very end here. Now, if you'll notice, I haven't touched Fix You or Coldplay. I'm going to leave these till the very end. I just want to turn them off for now by clicking on the eye here at the very left. Now, this is all unwell and we can just call it a day from here. But I want to give it a little bit of a kick and a spice and give it a little bit of a nice seamless transition. I think right about maybe the fifth second here, what I wanted to do is I want to again select all my layers, hit "P", select out. Right about here, I want to actually change their positions again and make them scatter around to the edges a little bit before they come in again to formulate the word. For example, I'm just going to take this one over here, which is the blue one here. I just want to push it up a bit, like so. I just want to repeat this for the rest of the layers, scatter them about towards the edges. Then we'll see what that looks like. You see they started out but shuffled and then they scatter a bit to the edges and then come back again and formulate the word. I want to do this same thing again, but I'm going to go to second 6:15 right before it reaches to the word again. I want to do the same exact exercise again, but this time instead of scatter them to the edges, I want to bring them a little bit closer to the middle just so we can have an even more seamless transition when it goes back into its original formation again. I'm just going to again play around with the positions here. Let's give this a preview. You see the hesitation a little bit when it goes out to the edges right here and then collects back in the middle and then goes back out again. I just want to drag these middle key from second 6:15-6:00. I'm just going to select all of them and track them out. Now as I'm looking at it, I feel like it's a little bit too slow for me at the beginning. I just want to speed it up a little bit. What we can do to fix that is maybe add the third second. I can just drag all my keyframes here and track them out to the third second. That's much better. Something else that I'm noticing is that there's not enough time at the end to actually look at the word, it just starts back up again. I want actually the end results here to not end at the last second that may be at the sixth second. There is at least time, two seconds at the end to look at the word. I'm just going to drag all my final keyframes here and just drag them out here to the sixth second. Then I can go to the fourth second here and take all of the penultimate keyframes and drag them right here. At least they're just spaced out like that. Now that I'm looking at it, I'm thinking we can have a few random paper shreds here and there, and at the very last second leader than other pieces, just so they don't all end at the same time. It'll add a bit of visual interests to the animation. Then see what that looks like. I'm thinking I want to just prolong this composition just a couple more seconds because it's not staying as long as I'd like it to be at the end, so I'm just going to make it to 10 seconds. You're going to find that these blue bars for the layers are cut off at the eighth second. I'm just going to select all, and just drag them out. That way it can stay beyond the eight seconds and just pause before it starts to back up again. I'm happy with that. I just want to add one final little tweak where the paper shreds move about ever so slightly just before the composition ends, and I would place that right about the seventh second here, just before the composition ends at the eighth second. What I'm going to do is select all my layers, and then make sure it's on P. Then I'm going to go to the diamond at the left. Then I'm just going to place all my keyframes here. Then the same thing with R, click on the diamond. Then you want to go to the seventh second here, right before it just comes about to the word again. I just want to play around with these shreds a little bit more, and maybe bring them up a bit, just a very slight movement, nothing too pronounced. I want it to be a very subtle shuffle. I'm just moving it one point above, one point under, so that it almost looks like Fix You, but not quite yet, just until the very last second it looks like Fix You. Then let's see what that looks like. That looks good. Now a top tip to do for something like this is Easy Ease. I'm going to select all of my keyframes here all the way to the top. I'm going to go to ''Animation'', ''Keyframe Assistant'', and then ''Easy Ease''. That's just going to literally ease out all of the smooth transitions, and it slows it down at certain parts and then speeds back up again to its normal speeds. It just makes things look a lot softer and not too much of a rigid movement. You see what a world of a difference that just made. You see that pause and that smooth transition all from Easy Ease, which is perfect. Last but not least is our Coldplay and Fix You names. We had hidden them in the beginning. I'm just going to unhide them now by clicking on the eye. What I'm going to do is that I want to push their positions at the beginning away from the poster. For Coldplay, I'm just going to drag it down so it's not visible. For Fix You, I'm going to drag it up. That's where they're going to be for the majority of the poster animation. Then I'm just going to click on the stopwatch. Then I'm going to go to maybe right about here in the middle of the seventh and the eighth second. I'm going to click on the diamonds again, just to tell it that this is where I still want it to be at the seventh and a half second. Then at the ninth second, I'm going to have Fix You come down here, and then Coldplay come up here. They're just going to appear just as the poster is finally formulated, and I'm just going to just push in there. Let's see what that looks like. That's pretty much it. We are done with this animation. That is the idea that I had for it. I know this may seem like a lot, but it's just because we have a lot of layers going on here. But this is all just placing keyframes of positions and rotations, and just changing them around as we go along at the time. The basic techniques here are super-easy and easily transferable onto anything you'll do later on. Imagine you have only like five or six layers here and you're just changing their positions through rotations to have that effect at the end. I'm just going to collapse all my layers here. You want to click out and just shortcut on your keyboard, press ''U''. That's just going to collapse all of the layers nice and neat. You don't have to do it individually. You can do the same thing, just press ''U'' again to expand them. There you go. I think we're ready to export this file. You just want to go to ''File'', ''Export'', ''Add to Render Queue''. Then this window is going to come up here. We want to go to ''Lossless'', next to ''Output Module'', and double-click on that, then we go to ''Format Options'', and I believe the default will be animation. You just want to drop down that menu. I like to use Apple ProRes 422 or high-quality, it's just a higher data version quality, and then we're going to compress it later. I'm going to go ahead and click that, and click "Okay", and "Okay" again. Then you have here the option to save it as whatever name you want to name it and wherever you want to save it as. I'm just going to save it to my desktop, and click "Save". That's pretty much it. We want to go to that pretty little button over here and click "Render". Now my friend we wait. You're going to hear that beautiful sound of rendering. Here we go. Love that sound. You just want to save this. I'm just going to go to my desktop here and you're going to find the file as an MOV file, which is a typical format for QuickTime. But this is usually a very heavy file format, so what I like to do is head over to Handbrake, and this is free to use, free to download off of Google for both Mac and Windows. It basically just compresses any videos to MP4 and there are tons of other options that you can play with. But I'm just going to drag it into the window here, and it's just going to be scanning it. You can save it as whatever name you want to save it as. Make sure you put it to the destination that you want to put it as. It's going to save it as an MP4, which retains the same high-quality of the video, but just a very smaller file size. You're going to go ahead and click "Start". That's it. You're done. You can just preview the file. Everything is good to go. We're done. 7. Class Project: [MUSIC] It's time for your class project. You have one of two options. You can either recreate and reinterpret the song that I've done for today's poster, or you can pick your own song and create your own poster for it, whether it's the song title or a part of the lyrics, it's up to you. I'll be uploading in the resources for you this guide to picking a song and guided questions on how you can transform that visually. I'll be picking at your brain with some questions that will spark certain images, references, emotions, ideas that will help you make that connection with the song title and hopefully a poster idea for it. Feel free to publish it as a still poster or an animated one. It's completely up to you, whatever you feel comfortable in. Make sure your poster is in A4 size, which is 21 by 29.7 centimeters. If you'll animate it then export it as a MP4 uploaded to either Vimeo or YouTube. In the class project, paste that video link in that section. Also include the artist's name and the song title in your poster. Don't forget to just have fun with it. Make it striking, make it crazy, make it minimal, it's up to you. When you're done, I highly encourage you to share it in the class project gallery so that I can see it along with everybody else. If you need any help, just ask me, I'll be more than happy to answer any of your questions. That's it. I can't wait to see your posters. [MUSIC] 8. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] On a final note, I want to leave you the key key from this class. First one is to pick a song title or part of the lyrics that's relatively short enough to give you enough room to experiment the type. But also something that holds meaning so it can help inspire you create an interesting visual composition that reflects that meaning. Then you want to plot references that help bring your idea to life. This can be anything from movie references, or nature, or illustrations, etc. Anything visual that can help you transform this idea into a tangible, visual interests. When designing your poster, don't be afraid to experiment with a type. Make it big, make it condensed, scale it up, scale it down, change its fonts, any basic tools from Illustrator will help you do so. In light of that being said, when you're done with the overall vector composition, I highly encourage you to add some textures, shadows, highlights if it's appropriate for your song. These little details will help take your boosters to the next level and add some complexity to it. Then when you're done and ready to animate, make sure you layered your file on Illustrator or Photoshop so you can easily play and move them around for animation. Then head-on to After Effects and use some basic techniques like you learned earlier to animate your poster. Or if you're feeling more adventurous and confident with the program, then by all means, give it your best shot. Finally, just remember to have fun, experiment and explore. Treat this class as a palate cleanser in-between your work or schoolwork. It's meant to serve you as a creative exercise that I personally use on a regular basis to expand my visual vocabulary. Use these posters to build up your portfolio or as a tool to inspire you for your next project. That's pretty much it. Good luck. [MUSIC] 9. Thank You: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for taking this class. I really hope you enjoyed it just as much as I had making it. If you found this class helpful or interesting or fun, please let me know what you thought of it in the reviews as it could help someone else know what to expect from this class. I'll be uploading all of my previous music posters down below for your reference to help inspire you or guide you or just giving you an idea of how you can go about this. When you feel refreshed and inspired again, I'd encourage you to hop onto my other classes, whether it's my logo design class for how to create a unique word mark or if you're a packaging enthusiastic, then I'd recommend taking my packaging design class where I walk you through my entire detailed process of how I re-brand a famous Swiss chocolate bar. You may or may not get hungry after that class, you have been warned. Also, feel free to follow me or tag me in your work on Instagram, I'd love to see it, I'd love to connect, I'd love to give you feedback or just chat or exchange music playlists. I'm always on the lookout for new music anyway. Thank you again and I'll see you on the next one. [MUSIC]