Transcripts
1. Intro: Wouldn't it be cool to have a fun animated logo for your personal website or business? If you think so, this is the class for you. Spoiler alert. It's easier than you think. Hi. My name is Chris Piascik. I'm an illustrator and sometimes animator with a background in graphic design. I've created illustrations and animations for brands like Nickelodeon, Google, Adidas, and even Cartoon Network. In this class, we'll illustrate and design a fun logo, we'll setup a file for animation in Procreate, we'll make your logo wiggle, or vibrate, we'll create a morphing animated loop, and then we'll export your logo for different uses. This as a beginner level class that should be approachable to a broad spectrum of people. You don't even need to be good at drawing to take this class. You don't need any prior animation experience or anything like that. It might be helpful if you've spent some time playing around with Procreate. But even if you haven't, that's totally fine. All you'll need for this course is an iPad, an Apple pencil, and the Procreate app. That's right. You don't even need a computer to create an amazing animation. I'll show you several techniques to create a personalized logo type, even if you don't have any prior topography or lettering experience. If you do, even better. Learning how to animate a logo in this class, will teach you the basic animation skills in the frame-by-frame process. This will provide a great starting point if you decide you'd like to explore animation even further. By the end of this class, you'll be able to create your own simple animations using Procreate on the iPad.
2. The Project: The project for this class is to create a fun illustrative logo and then bring it to life through some simple animation using Procreate on the iPad. First of all, brainstorm and research ideas. Next, we'll sketch out different ideas. Then we'll narrow down our sketches and tighten up and refine one of them to use as our final logo. Finally, we'll export our animation and share it. Please share your final projects in the project gallery so we can all check them out. As always, I'll provide feedback for each and every one. In addition, please feel free to share your logos you create before you begin animating them as well. It will be fun to see where you're starting from.
3. Brainstorming & Research: The first step in creating something always require some research and brainstorming. Making a logo for yourself is no different. You need to consider what you want that logo to express. Should it be serious or should it be silly? Should it be somewhere in between? If you're creating a logo for yourself, you want to have a mark that expresses the vibe that you give off or your work gives off so that it feels cohesive with the rest of your work. As an illustrator, I want my logo to be reflective of the kind of work that I do. My work is handmade, kind of goofy, a little bit silly, or a bit weird. so I wouldn't want to have a very serious logo. I'll also probably wouldn't want a logo that was made out of a specific font or something like that since a lot of hand lettering is a big part of what I do. A good first step would be to look at a whole bunch of different logos and save the ones that you like or resonate with you on a Pinterest board, or even just a folder on your desktop, or a folder on your phone. I don't care what the folder is, that's up to you. Check out people who do similar things to what you do. see what they're using for a logo. If you're creating a logo to use on a portfolio site, keep in mind that simple is often better. You don't want your logo to detract from either work on your site. After all, that's why you have the site at all. You want to showcase your work. Another thing to keep in mind is that your logo needs to work and be legible at a small size. In that regard as well, simple is usually better. Though we'll be drawing our final logo and animating it by hand in Procreate, you can start with an existing typeface if you want. Tracing over an existing typeface can add a lot of energy to something that may otherwise come across as blunt, especially, when we add some movement to it, we'll wiggle that blunt right out of it.
4. Exercise 1: Animating with Fonts: I don't know about you, but for me, making a logo for myself is overwhelming, and you might think, well you're just going to do something simple. Well that's hard too, so instead of diving right into that, let's just loosen up and go right in and just animate something. What better way to have fun than just make a quick little animation. I mean I guess there's other ways to have fun but this is pretty fun too. For this first exercise, we're not even going to draw anything, we're just going to use some typefaces in Procreate and just do a quick little three-frame animation, and you'll be surprised how cool it is, or maybe you won't. I think you will though. I think you might be surprised. After we do that, we'll pick an existing typeface, and then we'll do a hand-drawn animation based on that typeface. That might sound a little confusing, but just follow along and it'll make sense. After we do these little exercises, then we can dive into the real hard work of making a logo that works for ourselves. To get started, we're just going to make a new document. We hit the plus at the top in Procreate. You can just choose the first option, the square, 2048 by 2048. It's a pretty good size for creating a simple animation. It gives you enough pixels that you have enough flexibility when you're drawing, but also isn't so large that the file become cumbersome as you're working. What we're going to do is click on the wrench up at the top and let's go to Canvas and then select "Animation Assist". When you turn that on, you'll see this little timeline thing comes up on the bottom. Next let's click on "Add", and then we can choose Add Text. Now we've got this little text box here and you can go ahead and put your name or whatever else you want to do. I'm going to do my name, Chris Piascik, and now we can highlight it by double-tapping and we can choose some fonts. Don't overthink this too much, we're just playing around, but you can choose your font over here, you can adjust the size with this little cool bar, you can adjust the spacing between the letters, and if you wanted it to take up more room, you can zoom in on the box. You can stretch the type box and that way if it gets bigger, you can take up more room. I'm going to spread these letters out just a little bit and now I'm going to click on "Add a Frame" on the timeline. Now that we have got this new frame, let's go ahead and click on the wrench and add text again. Let's type in the same name that you did before, or a word or whatever, and let's choose a different font this time. I'm going to just do the bold version of future, and make my text-box bigger so that I can try to match the size. To make this what we're doing work, you want to try to get your letters to line up as well as you can, so you can adjust that with size, or the tracking of the letters. It doesn't have to be perfect but it'll help make the animation a little bit smoother if they line up pretty good. Okay, cool. Let's add another frame and you'll see that we can see both of our previous frames. That can be a little confusing, so if we go to Settings, you can drag this onion skin frames down to one and that's just going to show you the previous or the next frame, and if you want this opacity to be a little bit later, you can drag that down. Let's go in and add text, and let's do the same thing again. Let's type the same word. I'm giving mine all uppercase, but you don't have to do that. I'm just noticing now on this timeline that every time we add text, it makes a new frame and that's not what we want. Let me show you how to fix that. I think sometimes when doing these demos, when there's mistakes, I like to leave them in because in case this might happen to you, you might get confused. Every time I add a frame, it's making a new layer and they show up down here, but every time I add text, it makes a new layer as well, so all we have to do is just get rid of the ones that aren't the text ones. Now you'll see we've got each of our frames. This is our new type. Now we want to do the same thing as well we want to line it up with the other type and we want to highlight it, double-tap on it, and we'll choose a different font this time. Let's see. I'm going to use one of my own fonts that I have made, so I'm going to line this up and then hit "Done". It's a little bit easier to see here, and then I adjust that a little bit more. Let's just adjust the spacing a tiny bit more. Okay, cool. That's better. Now we've got all three. Now if we go down to our timeline and we can hit "Play", and you can see cycles between them really quickly, so we can adjust that speed here. We can bring this down. A typical animation frame rate is 12 frames per second. That's referred to as animating on twos because traditional video is 24 frames per second, so let's try 12. That's a pretty nice feel to it. Let's experiment a little bit slower. Bring down to eight to see how that looks. I think I like that for this purpose. It's really up to you what speed or style you want it to look like. Another thing we can do is we can add a little bit of color if you want. Click on this first layer, highlight the type, and then we can click on the color thing up top. I want to make that a red, and then I'm going to go to the second one, double tap and I want to make that one orange. It's almost like a gradation and then for this last one, let's make this pink color. That's pretty fun. Now we have a cool simple little animated type treatment and we didn't have to draw anything. If you wanted to use this as is, you could just go ahead and go to Share, and then you could just do Animated GIF, and there you go. If you wanted it without a background, you could just turn on Transparent Background and you would just choose where you save it.
5. Exercise 2: Starting with a Font: Just like the last time we're going to start by clicking the little toolbar at the top. A little wrench icon. We're going to go to Add to the first selection and then Add text. Then we will type our word or name. I'm going to use my name again. I'm going to battle with it wanting to auto capitalize it because I want to keep it a lowercase for this. Then once you have it typed out, you can double tap on it to highlight it. Then we can change our font. I'm going to choose a font that I have created myself. I'm going to show you how to import that. Import it typeface if you want to use something that's not already available on Procreate. If you click over here on the right side of this options window, you'll see import font. We click on that. You can click on this little top icon and choose locations on where you have your font saved. This is on your computer. You're just going to want to make sure you save it into your iCloud Drive or Dropbox or creative cloud, whatever you have synced up. Then once you do that, you would just go in and find it. I already have mine selected here. You just hit import and when I choose fonts I'll be able to go in here and find the typeface that I imported. There it is. I'm going to make this a bit bigger to stretch the box out so that I can make it bigger without breaking into two lines. I think that looks about good. Now I'm just going to center it in my document. Wipe some crap off my screen. Now we are ready to start. For this version, we're going to trace this two times to create that traditional animation, vibration or wiggle. We're going to click on that toolbar again. We're going to go to Canvas and then Animation Assist. Now that we have that turned on, we can go down here. You'll see that we have a blank layer at the beginning, so we can just drag that over. Now when we select that blank frame, you'll see that our name has gone gray to show us it's on a separate frame, and now we can trace over this. I'm just going to grab my brush and just start tracing over this. Some quick tips that might be helpful when you're doing this kind of thing. Since we want to keep this pretty accurate, I like to work on similar lines all at once to get the movement right. Also not doing this in the morning like I am right now is usually helpful because I have shaky coffee hands. When you're tracing this, what you want to keep in mind is that you want to try to do a good job and try to trace it pretty accurately, that wiggle and vibration is going to be a natural result of the drawing process. When you noticed that vibration in old-school traditional animation, it's not because the animators were trying to make it imperfect, they were actually trying hard to make it as close as possible, but just the action of drawing something over and over again, there's just subtle variations that you can't really fix. Especially when you're working with paper and pencil like old-school animations were. Just worry about tracing it. Don't try to make it imperfect. You try to make it imperfect, it's likely going to be pretty dramatic difference and that's going to make it not look natural. Instead of looking like a rhythm, it's going to look like a repetition that's just reflashing back and forth. I'm going to just trace over these letters trying to go as close as I can and it will speed this up so you don't have to sit through this whole process. Once you've outlined everything, you can go ahead and click and hold on the color over on the top right and drag it onto your letters to fill them. If you keep holding and don't let go you'll notice there's a ColorDrop Threshold at the top. This allows you to find tune how well it fills the letters. I like to take it just to mount right before it goes too far and then leave it there. That way you ensure that you get a nice clean fill without any weird edges. You'll see sometimes that you'll have to adjust that setting for different letters because of how your lines are. When that happens, you just click and drag and adjust that threshold a little bit. Now we will click Add a Frame and do that once more. Now that you've traced it over three times, we can go and check out our little animation. First thing you want to do is click on Settings and we want to bring our frame rate down to 12 frames per second. It's a good place to start because that's the traditional frame rate for animation. Now we can hit play. You'll see we've got a nice vibration going on. You'll see it all looks pretty normal. I think there's one thing that stands out to me which is on the A, bulges out to the right a bit more than the other letters. If that's something that you want to adjust, that's easy enough. You just pause this and scroll through our frames and we can see where the issue is. The gray is the next frame and you can see that frame it jumps out quite a bit. Click on that one, and erase some of it. You'll notice now that we can't really see what's going on, you're going to adjust our settings here to try to fix that a little bit. If you choose this Blend primary frame option, it'll show you that overlap. It makes it nice and easy to see if we want to erase that. I'm just going to go ahead and grab my eraser and just take a little bit off of this. Now when we hit play, has more of the same vibration that the other letters have. Check, I think it looks really good. I want to experiment now with doing a slightly slower frame rate, maybe 10, I think it would be good. I think that looks pretty good. I'm pretty happy with that. I think that's pretty good. If you wanted to use this as it is, you would just go to the little tool wrench icon at the top and then go to Share and choose Animated GIF or Animated MP4. If you want it without a background, you just hit the Transparent background option, and then Export and you would save it wherever you wanted to and it's ready to go.
6. Sketching With Inspiration: I've gathered some inspiration here for some other logos that I liked. There are in line with what I am going for. As I mentioned, I want to keep things simple for myself. I just want a simple lettering treatment that has the same vibe as my work. It's pretty loose and again, most importantly, simple. These are a bunch that I like and I save them and just throw them together in a document. I'll just talk about them quickly a little bit. I really like the bold simplicity of this Corey Danks logo. I like that it looks like a typeface, but it seems like it's hand-drawn. I think it's just bold and simple, I like that. I like the idea of an icon of some sort. I don't know if that'll work for me, but it's something I'm considering. I think this Brandon Land one is super fun. I love that little portrait. I think that this one is a little too specific to Brandon. I just like it. I think a portrait of myself might not work. The Killer Acid logo, I think is awesome. I like the illustrated icon. I like this little brain thing with the types of wrapping around it. That feels in line with the stuff that I do. But again, I think I might not want an illustrated element in mine. But when you're collecting stuff that you like, it may not be perfectly applicable for the logo you're making, but sometimes it's just about inspiration and getting excited. For me, I think that's the biggest part of this process. I generally collect these things and I don't really work from them too much. I like to just look at a bunch of stuff and then I get excited about possibilities, and then I just go from there. I'll show you more concretely how I maybe use this stuff, but it's not as direct as you might think. Again, I really love the bold simplicity of Kelsey's logo and these little graphic lines on Lisa Congdon's logo. The incorporation of that little pencil, I think it's fun. Mary Kate McDevitt and Andy J. Pizza, those lettering styles, just very simple, but clearly handmade or definitely in line with what I'm going for. They feel similar to what I've been using for the past 10 years. But I'm just sick of it. I like this handmade script that Jesse LeDoux has here. In both that L icon and the M in Mary Kate McDevitt, I think those are nice little touches. I think having a little pull L mark would be fun. But again, I don't know. Necessarily that'll work as well for me. Then Christopher Delorenzo, I love the bold simplicity and then just like the little bits of character, the HE ligature, the line on the Z, just very simple but very stylish. Sometimes I'll just start sketching on a page like this. Maybe look at specific things and see how they might work for me. I might just look at Andy's logo and see, what it would look like if I had something similar? I'll just go and make a new layer and circle, having my name, work it through just like bold, simple letters like that. I'll just take some loose inspiration without copying it. Maybe try some other things. Paying attention to what I like about this logo. It's just the looseness and simplicity, but also the moving baselines where it's not perfect, so maybe I'll try some stuff of that. Just not trying to copy too closely, but just seeing what my name will look like with some of the things that stand out to me within his. Maybe this loose script thing. I wonder if something like that might work for me. Just loose, playful script where you're not being too perfect. I always have a hard time with script in my name. I felt the letters don't work that well. Maybe something a little more static like Mary Kate McDevitt, even though it has a lot of individual character. Like boxy, so I don't know, maybe see how something like that might work for me. Again, I'm not trying to be careful, I'm just playing around trying some things. Sometimes I might not even finish. I like the way the Killer Acid and Kelsey Dake's play off each other and then move around a little bit. So maybe I could try something or it's moving around. I'll do my first name, loose like this and then maybe see if I can wrap my last name into the shape that's left over. Just fun. If I do something like this or I think it's maybe has potential, I'll go ahead and turn down the opacity and then maybe draw on top of it, see if I can work on it and make it a little bit better. Maybe working on how this R sits in here, see, we use that S to go into that space and exaggerate how they play off each other. You can think about the negative space and how they can work together. So the H has a wide opening at the bottom and the A can slide into it maybe. I think that's looking cool. Sometimes I'll just keep doing this and changing a little bit as I go. Trying to try different things tainted up like, maybe what if I use more angular letters. As you'll notice, I'm not even looking at the the logo that initially inspired me. I think that's important. You can take some initial inspiration, but you definitely don't want to copy what someone else has done. You want this to be unique for yourself. Usually I won't stay on this page too long where I have the other logos up, I just sometimes we'll use it as some initial inspiration. I think that's pretty cool for now. I'm not going to obsess about it in too much detail yet. Maybe I could try, I like goofy's goals, I like drawing them silly. I don't know. I like the idea of a skull, because it's badass, but then making it goofy. Makes it funny. Maybe that could be something. Maybe I could draw a goofy skull and then maybe try to wrap my name around it. Kind of cool. Again, bring down the opacity and try that again. See if I can make it fit together a little bit better. Let me draw the skull a little better. Think about how the letters interact with the space. Again, I like to stay loose at this point. I don't want to focus too long at any one of these. Then sometimes you can just get caught up in noodling with one, one it will stop you from just doing lots of accelerations. I'll just keep that in mind.
7. More Sketching: At this point, I will just start with a fresh document and I will just start drawing the whole bunch, just trying to play around and figure somethings out. Sometimes I'll just start as simple as possible. I'll just write my name in just plain simple uppercase letters, and then maybe I'll try the lowercase letters. Once you do that, you can look at them, see if there's anything you notice, any sort combinations, where they could fit together. Sometimes there isn't anything. Sometimes you don't even know where to begin. Sometimes I'll try to put them together in ways where they'll lock into each other. Let's start with the C, open like this and then maybe tuck the H in there, and maybe we can curl this leg of the R up as like a little seat for the I and then pull the S in, so it sort of makes it into a shape as opposed to individual letter, so they're all interacting with each other. You can make the counter of the P a little shorter and then stick the I below it. Exaggerate the S so it comes back into that space. Do the same with the C and tuck the I in, and then I'll go and make it smaller so not to look at it. You can make a new layer if you want to have more flexibility. You could try some just like big fat letters or something. Sometimes I won't even draw the whole word. I'm just playing around with different ways I can write the word. Maybe some crusty punk style letters or something like that. Looks like a misfit logo or something. Try some variations of script. Maybe like a dramatic one like that, or like a more traditional script-angled one. You could play around with making it more decorative, like maybe swirling that part of the S over and using it to dot the I. I think that's all too fussy and fancy for me, but it's a fun thing to try. Sometimes just making a shape around the words makes it feel like a logo. Like giving it a little house to live in. Another thing to remember is, what will make a logo look like a logo is using it as a logo. You take anything, any one of these and just tighten it up and put it on your website or something. It'll look like a logo. You could put a little house on it and we put some little decorations. If you're struggling with lettering and that's a tricky thing for you, sometimes you can take inspiration from existing typeface, or you can use them altogether. You can go to Add texts like we did in exercise, See if there's something that stands out to you. Maybe you could go in and find something that looks like you want, but maybe you want it to feel a little bit looser. I know I want something simple and bold, so maybe I'll set it in bold future, and then I could go in and trace that and see if I can add a little bit of character to it to give that hand-drawn look that I'm going for. I'll just turn down the opacity on that layer and make a new one, trace over it, but make it more loose. Adding a little bit of wiggle to it to give it some grit. Tracing over loosely in existing typeface can have a fun effect because it will have the structure, and proportions of the typeface. But it will just get a whole bunch of character by just introducing that hand on line. Even if you try to trace it tighter, it will still have that look. I'm definitely going looser and trying to make it look more, I don't know, distressed or beat up. If we drag this up, we can turn back on original, the one up top. Just a quick tracing, but it definitely feels more in line with what I would like to do. Some more character than just that straight type doesn't really match my illustration style.
8. Sketching with Shapes: Another thing you could play around with is starting with a shape, so maybe you could just squiggle out like a logo shape, and then use that as a framework and try to fit your type into it. Put a line to divide the two; my first and last name. I'm going to use this as a grid. I'm turning down the opacity and I'm going to make a new layer. Then I'm going to draw my type in here. The first step will be to map it out and make a loose grid, so I'll just keep very simple letters. Just put them in here to see how much space they're going to take up. Sometimes you won't get this right away but that's why we're keeping it simple. At this point I will turn down the opacity, and then use that as a guide to make it fit a little bit better. We had some extra space over here. I'm going to loosen this up a little bit to get more consistent spacing. Turn up that first one and bring down the opacity on this one. Now since we have this guide to work from, I'm going to try to make the letters, have a little bit more character and fit the space in each other a little bit more, trying to follow this outer shape. So maybe I'll use that as the side of the sea. Just try to draw that letter to fit the edges. You could do the same with the H. Bring it up to those lines. Maybe with the R, I will use this leg and pull it under just to make it feel more like a locked together piece instead of individual letters, so it fills the space a little bit more. We're going to have a empty space at the bottom of the P, so put the I down here like we did before. But now we're starting to see that we're going to have a little bit of extra space to account for, so I'm going to make this A a bit bigger, and I'm going to curve that like this to come in to fix this shape over here where we needed more of this curve to fill it in. The S sets us up nicely for that. So paying attention to what's going to come next will help you decide what you can do to work the letters to make them still readable. Then maybe we'll do what we did with the R where it curves under the eye. We can do that to the C here, and maybe we can pull the top of the C down to fill the space out a little bit. Now what I would do is bring down the opacity yet again and see if we can make it fit together even better and make it a little more interesting. I think starting with bringing the A up like this might be a nice way to do that. Since we're doing this curve on the A, sometimes it's nice to do the same thing with other letters so that it feels a little bit more consistent. Maybe we'll curve this R and maybe bring that leg down. Maybe we can curve it like the top of the S. Again, I'm not trying to go to tight here because I'm wanting to just play around and explore how the letters work together, and if you are going too slow and drawing too tight, you won't be able to experiment as much. You can do as many of these as you want and just keep evolving it until it gets to where you want it to be. Then we've got this interesting shape, which is kind of fun, and you could experiment, maybe see what it looks like if you put a border around it, just fun. Maybe some little concentric circles. Another thing you could try is just using an existing shape. Let's say, we want to try circle. We could go ahead and use the selection tool and choose ellipse. Make a new layer, trace around it. Actually, just fill that up. Sometimes starting with a solid block of shape, there's a nice way to do this. Turn off that selection. Instead of drawing directly on this layer, I'm going to make a new layer, and I'm going to change my brush to white and I'm going to draw on top of this. You can do the same thing we did with that abstract shape but we can do it within the circle. So draw a line across the middle and divide it up for our letters; C, H, R, I, S, P, I, A, S, C, I, K. Again, we'll bring that opacity down, so we can see it. Then let's draw on top of it and see if we can make it a little more fun and interesting. First, I'll just do a simple version with letters that just use the space without trying to make it too complicated. We're just thinking of the letters that we drew as sort of like a skeleton, and we can draw our letter meat on top of it. Sometimes I'll start with the middle letter because it'll help me determine how much space I need to save or account for as I'm drawing the others. As you can see, that S cut, pretty big and now these outside letters are getting small, which gives it a fun effect, makes it look like it's most bulging in the center. Another thing you can do is, instead of just dividing it straight across, make a different base line. So maybe we'd start off like a wave and more dramatic so that one of the words that's bigger than the other. Again, we'll do the same thing, we'll just use simple letters to just figure out how much space each one's going to take up. Bring down the opacity and let's play around with this. Right off the bat, I'm noticing the leg of the R in this curve are already flowing into each others. Maybe we can do the same thing with the C. Then we can exaggerate the bottom of the S to use that space. I think I'm going to tuck the I under that P again. Put that A down. Push the S up like that to use that space. Curve the C up to mimic the others. You put the I in there. I like what is happening with Chris, but I think my last name is getting a little bit weird here. But again, we're just fine tuning as we go. I'm going to turn off that little wave line because it's distracting now, and we'll put up a new layer. Let's see what we can do to make this work better. Let's pull this R down a little bit further. Sometimes I'll focus on the areas where there are problems first. This I and the C combination are a bit weird, and they're making the K a little small, so maybe we'll push out that bottom K line. I think that's fun. Another way you can do this is like the knockout method, where you cut your letters out of this shape. We can do the same way by working with white on this top layer. Let's turn back our first guide here. We're going to do this one a little bit different. What we'll do here is we'll divide our circle up into spaces for each letter. I'm just drawing lines around each of the letter forms. Now that we did that, let me do new layer so that I don't have to redo that again if I don't want to. Now we can cut in to make our letters out of these shapes. For the C, for example, we could just cut out some of that letter to make the C. We could cut up middle spaces for the H. For this R we cut that part out, and then we need this bottom part. A little dot. S is a little tricky. We can do a little slot there. We're going to just leave it like that. We could consider doing something like that as well, which is cool. Maybe I like that better. The P, we can cut that in. The I is already an I. The A, we just do what we did with the H, but don't break all the way through at the top. The space for the S might be a little too skinny, but again, we can go back in and do another version after this. We could do a slightly different C this time. The letter K. This is a totally different look and feel, but it's pretty cool. This is the block letter technique, and my friend Mary Kate McDevitt has some great tutorials on doing block lettering. If you're sort this vibe, I would heavily suggest checking out what she's doing and lessons on this stuff.
9. Narrowing Down Your Sketches: At this point, you should have a whole bunch of rough sketches and ideas. Let's narrow that down to two or three. We'll then take those two or three, tighten that up, maybe make a few revisions, make a couple of variations on each, and see where that gets us. Here are some of my sketches that I liked more than others. I tightened these up a little bit just to get a better feel for them, but this is the final grouping. Now I'm going to narrow this down to two or three. I'm just going to go in here and let's just make a new layer, and I'm going to circle some of these. I like this one, and I like this one, and I think this one. Yeah, I think those are my favorite. Prefer those over these, so at this point I'm just going to take these out of here and put them on their own page so I can just focus on them without all these distractions. Since I have these all as a group, I'm just going to use the selection tool, and then just copy and paste the ones that I like. So cut this one, copy and paste. I put it on its own layer. These are my final three. I'm pretty happy with how the bottom two look right now. I think I would tighten up this middle one a little bit more, and then this top one I like, but the angle is a bit weird. But then when I rotate it, I don't know, I feel like it doesn't work as well. So I think I'm just going to make the hard call and say that it's not as strong for me as these other two. I'm just going to go ahead and remove that. Now we're narrowed down to these two. I'm definitely leaning towards this one down here. It feels nice and simple, but has some character to it. I like the way the letters fit together, I like the sort that it makes. I think to be sure, I'm just going to do a little bit tighter version of this top one, and then come back and see which one I like the best. To do that I'm just going to make it a little bit bigger so that I have lots of flexibility, and we can draw it nice and tight. I'm going to bring down the opacity, and then just do a new layer, and trace over it. I'm going to get black, I'm going to use this Ryan Hamrick ink solid streamline brush, that's a nice brush for getting some nice crisp lines. Basically what I'm doing is just trying to refine some of these shapes and line weights, and just clean it up altogether. So since I have all this black 3D thing, I can just draw a straight line across the top to make that nice and crisp. I'm going to make this little bit wider here. Sometimes when there's shapes like this where there's a crossbar on the edge, I'll just draw all the way across so that I can get that line nice and straight, and then just go in and erase what I need for the middle part. Now I have my tightened up version of that [inaudible] , and I don't know, it's a tough call. I think you're going to have to tune in for the next lesson to find out which one of these I pick. Feel free to share your narrowed down sketches or even the group of your sketches. Maybe you can get some feedback from the group and myself on which one seem to be working the best. Sometimes it's helpful to have an extra set of eyes, or a whole bunch of eyes, help you to narrow it down.
10. Making Your Logo Loop: Now let's narrow it down to the best one. The bestest most perfect logo. I'm just kidding. You're never going to feel like that, or you might, but for me, especially doing a logo for myself, sometimes you just need to commit to one of them. If that's you, you can do it, or just commit to it, and just remember it's going to get even cooler when we animate it. Once you're satisfied with your final logo, all we're going to do now is trace that logo two more times. Then, we'll have three drawings of the same logo, and we'll just loop them just like we did in the earlier exercise, and now we'll have a cool vibrating loop of your logo. This may be all you want. This simple vibrating loop is perfect for a website, but we're going to go a little bit further. This three frame loop will be the starting point for what we do next. Now we have three drawings of our type treatment. We have everything we need for our wiggelyogo. We'll go into our settings, bring this down to 12 for a starting point, and then hit "Play". Cool. I think this is looking pretty fun. Actually I see two problem areas. The counter on the R and then the side of the P that bounces a little too aggressive, I think. I'm going to try to clean those up. I'm going to show you a quick tip on how to make this easier. If you go into your settings on the timeline, we can do Color Secondary Frames, and what this does is it makes the frames different colors, so you can see where they overlap. You can see here why that jump so much, same with the R. Another option is the Blend Primary Frames with a secondary color turned off. If we click on the middle one, you can see the dark areas is where there's overlap. This is not that dramatic, so that looks like it's our problem area. Let's go back to the Color Secondary Frames, I think this is our best solution for fixing this. As you can see, the green is our next frame, so when we go there, comes in. What I think we'll do is just go in and erase the counter on two of them, and then use one as a starting point. Now, fix that line up, and I'm just going to cover up the red and the green there on that one, and then I will cover up the red on this one, and this should give us slightly cleaner results on the R. Let's try that. Cool. The change is enough there, but there's still that way that it'll bump that I must have missed. There we go. You can see on this frame, the flat spot. We'll just go in and erase that, and now, that's a little less jarring. I do think the overall speed is a little too fast, anyway, so I think I'll bring that down as well. But first, let's fix the P. It looks like this one is just really wide, so I'm just going to go in and erase this until I can just barely see that green. Now I will just draw a tighter line, just trying to get as close as possible to it. Now it shouldn't jump as much. There we go. Everything has a pretty consistent wiggle, and I think that's good. But it's a little too fast, so we'll bring this down to, let's try that. Cool. This is what we'll use as the starting point or the end point. If this is all you want for your logo, that's totally fine. This will be ready to go and export news. But I'm going to show you some different things we can do to add a little more fun to this, some little embellishments, and morph this into something else. So stick around.
11. Adding Embellishments: In this lesson, I'll show you how to add some animated embellishments to make your loop even better. The first thing we're going to do to spice this up a little bit is to add some little motion lines to it. We don't want to draw directly on these frames because we might need them in the future to expand upon this and multiply them. First thing we should do is name them so that we don't get confused. If you just tap on that and go to "Rename," and let's just call this one 1, call this one 2, call this one, you want to guess? Three. Good job. Cool. Instead of just hitting Add Frame down here, let's make some groups. In order to make a group, you just click and hold on this, and then drag it on top of the other layer. Now, we can draw on this layer and it'll be part of that first frame. We'll still have access to the original, just the lettering. While we're here, let's adjust this Onion skin opacity, let's bring it down a little bit, and let's change the Onion skin frames from max to one. That'll just show us the previous frame and the next frame so it'll be less confusing. What we're going to do now is just do a little motion burst that's going to come off the sides. For this, what we want to do is just have a starting point. It looks like a little dot. I'm going to switch to a brush that isn't smoothing on me. Let's just put these little dots here. We'll do three. We'll put three over here. Now, we can go in and hit "Plus," and add another frame and then put that onto two. So it'll be part of the second one. Now we can see these little dots. What we're going to do is create a burst that shoots out the side like a motion line, and then vanishes off in a nice little loop. What we'll do here is start at where that dot is, and then just draw a line, a little action line that's tapering, like a little poof. You can already tell when you scroll through, you see that motion happening. We click on this frame, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to add another frame in there, and then merge it to make a little group. Then here, we can just start about halfway across this line and just make it a bit bigger, maybe even bigger than that. You want to make sure you're following the same trajectory so it looks natural. You can scroll through and see that happening. It looks pretty neat. As I mentioned, we might need more of the texts frames. Because we need three to be a loop and we need a few more frames for this motion to finish, what we can do now is we can name the groups so that it's less, because we can't see the individual frames. Let's do three. Now we can duplicate these. We'll do an extra for each, and then we can just drag them into the right order. I'll just put 1, 2, 3, so 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. We'll go up to this one and what we want to do now is erase what we had on the motion lines because we're going to be adding onto them. Now, we'll go back to one because this is the next frame after three and you can see we've got the continuation of our lines there. We want to try to resolve these lines and what I mean by that is make them end in a natural way so that we can make this loop, and just not look like there's a start and a finish. We want it to just be a constant loop. In order to do that, we don't want it to just go off the edge of the page because if this was placed on the top of a website, we'd have a weird abrupt line on it. What we can do is, instead of it going off the page, we can just have it looks like it was maybe going off in the distance or fizzling out. You got to make sure you're on the right layer. What we can do is maybe pull it out as far as we can go and just have it get thin. It's breaking up into, just like falling apart, so it's like little dots. We'll see if that works. So it's like fizzling out or something. Now we can go to Group 2, and we can see what we have left. Let's just start about halfway down there and just make these shapes a little bit less, just imagining what they would look like if this was disintegrating. I think this is going to work pretty well. We scroll through. You can see it looks pretty good, and because we duplicated our three frame wiggle, that is just a perfect loop. Let's play it, give it a shot. Cool. We've got this perfect little loop with those little burst lines that going across, which I think is pretty cool. I duplicated that and kept our groups, but erased what was going on, our little motion lines. I can try something else here. Another thing that you could do is maybe we could try a little border thing that goes around the edges. I'm just loosely making a frame that goes around the letters. I'm wiggling my hand a little bit to get this jagged, almost like an electric lightning line. Cool. Now I'm going to go to the next group. Make sure I'm on the blank layer. I'm going to just trace that, but going to wiggle a little more, a little differently. Because this is a thin line, I think we can be a little more playful and not match it too closely, and it'll give us a cool effect without being too distracting. Another thing we can do is maybe experiment with a different color afterwards to make it feel more in line with the lightning bolt vibe. Let's just do it once more. Again, you want to click on the frame that is not our text frame in case we have to reuse it. One thing that's helpful that you can do is on the Settings, if we move this to two, we can see both of the frames. When you're doing something like this where you want it to be a little bit different, you can make sure that you're doing something in between the two lines. For example, here, I could just try to stay in the middle of the two. Let's try that out. That's fun. Maybe we can make it look even more lightning by making it yellow. I'm going to turn off the color secondary frames because it is a different color, and it's going to confuse things. I'm also going to bring this back down to one so that we're not seeing lots of stuff at once. If we select our line frame here and click on the layer name, we can change this to Alpha Lock, and this will let us just block in color just over that line. What I'm going to do is just grab a fat brush, this one, and make it as big as possible. Then I'll just grab yellow and I can just color over it, and because we have that glare set to Alpha Lock, it will just color on what has been drawn on that layer. See, that's what happens if you don't Alpha Lock it. So Alpha Lock. Then once more, Alpha Lock. We'll play that.
12. Morphing Your Logo: Part 1: In this lesson, I'll show you how to take your animated loop of your logo, and morph it into something else. That something else could be a title, could be a description of what you do, could be an object, could be a slice of pizza, could be whatever you want. I'm not here to tell you what you should morph your logo into, I'm just here to empower you to be able to morph your logo into whatever you want. Let's get some morfindun. Let's mighty morphin Power Ranger this thing. Was that their tagline, mighty morphin? I don't if you can tell, but I'm a little old for Power Ranger jokes. I was a teenager when they came out, and I never really watched. I never saw the Power Rangers. I'm trying to relate to you guys, maybe you saw them. I didn't see them. What are we talking about again? Morphing logos. Let's go do you that. I don't want to talk about Power Rangers anymore. I'll see you later. The first morph, I'm going to change my name into the word illustrator because that's what I do. I like to have Animation Assist turned off for this stage, you can turn it back on afterwards. Then I go over to my Layers, and I just keep one of them on. I don't want all three of them on. Then I will turn down the Opacity, so it's light enough that I can see what I'm doing. Then I will do a new layer on top of that. On this layer, I am going to map out what I plan to change my name into for the morph. As I mentioned, I'm going to do illustrator. Illustrator is a long word and my name is stacked here, so I'm thinking, I'm going to break it into two words. Not two words but a hyphenated word, because I think it will look better. Just like we did in the sketch phase, I'm just going to map this out by just blocking in the letters to see how much space they are going to take up. I'm going to do illus and then trator. I'm just figuring out how much space it's going to take up here. Then just like before, I'm going to bring down the Opacity there, and then do a new layer. I can try to make it match a little bit better to the shape. What I am doing the morph, I want to have these new words sort the same space. I'm planning to use this logo from my website. I want it to work in the same space. I don't want it to expand up or down or to the sides. I want overall to have the same shape and also have a similar overall shape will make the morph a lot easier. For the i, I'm thinking I'm going to match this part of the sea and just do an uppercase I, like that. Then maybe we could do some stacked Ls using the H lines like that. Maybe the U can use the I as one of its legs, then we could just repeat that S. As you can see, I'm following the overall shape where it goes up and down and trying to match the letters. This might not always work, but it does make things easier. I noticed right off the bat that this K over here would morph easily into an R. I'm just going to go with that. Then we come back over here, try to figure out this side, we put this T in here, see how this is going to work. We can tuck the O there. Maybe we can do a similar R to the old R in Chris up top. Then see if we can tuck the A on top there. I think that's looking pretty good. I'm going to turn off that Sketch Layer and bring down the Opacity a little bit. I'll see if I can get it a little bit closer. I'm not completely crazy about how this bottom half works, so I'm going to try to make that a little bit better. Let's see. Let's make sure we get a new layer. We'll start with this R, maybe if we exaggerate that leg a little bit, maybe we can widen the A little bit, and so it can use the space a little bit better. Maybe we can make this T, the top of the T, pushed into that other space. I'm just going to move that leg of the T a little bit. I think the top was pretty good, let me just block it in, so I can get a better visual to see how I feel about it. I think I might tuck these Ls together a little bit more. Extend that bottom ones, we don't get that weird little space. Then the S, keep it about the same, put little hyphen, and get rid of that layer. Turn off my name, so I can focus on this a little bit more, see how it looks. At this stage, I am going to just tighten this up and do it in a similar line weight to my logo. I'm going to use the same brush that I used and select "black". Going to turn down the "Opacity". I'm going to make a new layer, and now, I'm just going to trace this. Now that I have this tightened up version, I will just double-check to see that it still works okay with my logo and doesn't get too much bigger. I always spot I see it change overall is the tops of these Ls, so I think I might shorten those a tiny bit just to keep them closer. Doesn't really matter too much unless you're working with a really limited space, but I want to keep them pretty close for my own personal preference. Unfortunately, we are going to have to draw this two more times so that we have a loop. I'm going to go ahead and do that right now and just turn down the Opacity, and we have to trace it. If you want to cheat a little bit, you could do about this much and then duplicate it. Then go back and finish it. It will still have that same effect because there's enough left that it won't look static because if it was holding for two frames, it doesn't seem like much, but it is a little bit, and it will help. I'm just going to check that this loop okay, so I'm going to turn on Animation Assist. Want to make sure that I just have those Illustrator Layers turned on. Then I'm going to just hit "Play". I'm going to back and make sure that my Opacity is turned up all the way. Now, we play. Cool. I think that has the right amount of wiggle for my preference. I think it has a similar amount of wiggle to my name. I think we are ready to start morphing this.
13. Morphing Your Logo: Part 2: What I'm going to do now is I'm going to name these. I'm going to name them A, B, C since I'm using 1, 2, 3 on my names. I'm going to turn off all of them except for one of my name and one of illustrator. Then I'm going to go add a frame. I'm going to drag it in between the two and select it. Now I can see both the illustrator title and my name. If yours doesn't look like this, it's because I have it set on color secondary frames. When you have that off, they're both shades of gray because they're both lettered in black. But if I do color secondary frames, it makes each of them a color so that I can see the difference between them. To morph these things in a natural way, it's really as simple as just moving or redrawing the image a little bit closer to where you want to get each time. That might sound confusing, but let me show you what I'm talking about. The red is my name, Chris Piascik, and then the green is illustrator. We're trying to get from the red Chris Piascik to illustrator. What we want to focus on is where they are already close. This right here is almost exactly the same. I'm just going to block in this bottom half and can do the top half since it's close enough. Because there's some separation here, I'm just going to go in between like that. This is close enough that I'm just going to get it there altogether. The middle part is a little trickier. This is where we are now. That's part of the C and this is part of the I, and we need to get them closer. What I'm going to do is just move that and a little bit like that, getting it closer to that part of the I. I'm going to fix this whole thing there. This is another easy spot. Since they're just about the same, I'm going to trace it over and just go all the way to the green areas where they overlap. We've got a couple of options here. We need this green area to fill in to get to illustrator and we have this red that needs to go away. We could slide this down if we wanted to or maybe we can move it over to become this part of this l. I think that's probably the best bet. What I'm going to do now is bring that in like that. It's slowly moving over. Then on the next frame, I'll push it over that way. Down here, you might start this a little bit like that, getting us closer. Where these two overlap, we could block that end if we wanted to. We could leave this space here if we wanted to or we can make it getting smaller in the middle. If we just fill in some of that red, so it doesn't completely go away. This is a little bit trickier. Again, R is for my name and U is where we're going. What I'm going to do is just start closing the counter of this R. Make that a little bit shorter. Bring this in a little bit closer. So we close this end and the next time you can get even closer and then it can eventually become one leg of the U. I'm going to expand the leg of the R, so that I start filling in some of the green and then dot in that leg like that. This I, we can just slightly move it over. You bring it down a tiny bit. So it serves to touch the bottom of the R. Make it a little bit wider. The S is almost the same. So I'm just going to trace in between the two spots. We don't have anything for this hyphen here. Sometimes I like to try to find an interesting way to show this. We could maybe extend this part of the S out and then have it fall off in the next frame and drop down. We can shift over this part of the P to move into the area the T is going to be. You can bring this top part of the P area up a little bit and then start to close the counter. We can make this I become the leg of the R. This area is a little tricky. So let's come back to that and do some of the easy stuff first. Like this K is already very close to the R. So I'm just going to expand this a little bit. We need to curve the top of the K to become the R. We'll start to pull this out and bend it. So it's not a dramatic shift, but then it'll allow us to move it closer to where we need to be in the end. I think it makes sense for this C to just closed and become the O. So just shortening that end of it, squishing it down a little bit. It's not like a jarring change, but it's enough. I think it might make sense for that A to just shrink and become the other A. I'm just going to trace it, but make it a little bit smaller and move it to the right a little bit. We can pull that part of the S over for the T and then we can shorten this part of it and eventually make it straight to become the trunk of the T. We still have to deal with this I. I'm thinking we will just shorten it and then it can become part of the T. At this point what we'll do is we'll turn off the name frame. Now we're going to use what we just drew as a starting point in the next part of the morph. We will do add a frame. Now we're a little bit closer to where we need to be. We're just going to keep moving with this evolution. Here, I'm just going to fully trace the top and bottom of the I because it's so close. This part of that C, we can bring it even closer to where we need to go and just start bellowing out that curve. We already have an I. It's just a little bent I. These l's are pretty close. We are removing this part end. So I'm going to have it start to pop out the other side now. I think we can do is merge these together, move it over a little bit. This R, we're squishing it together so we can keyboard down that, bring in almost all the way over. We can have it form the U, but just make it stick out a little bit to not forget that shape was there. I'm going to come up to the top of the green there and then just bump that out to follow that shape. Then this is close enough that we can bring it in. We don't want to completely forget about this counter. So we can have it just gets smaller. We can truly solidifying S. As I mentioned, we can make this thing become the hyphen. Lets make color line. We can move this part of the R down a little bit, start bending that even more and just trace the rest. We can fully close the C to make it an O and move it down a little bit. Can move this over, and then we've got that part from the I and then maybe just shorten that. We can pull this S even further and make it a little bit straighter, getting closer to becoming the trunk of the T. I'm just going to draw the middle point between these two A's and draw the leg of the R. We need to start making this other part that didn't exist. I'm just going to have it start coming out from the sides, draw it in like it's growing from the trunk, and make the rest of the top of the T. You can move this over, so that it's fully within the green area and then just make this P countered, almost disappear. Again, we will turn off that previous layer and then do a new one. Now we're even closer and we're just going to continue the progression. Here, I would just draw almost exactly where it's going to be, but just getting rid of that lump because we can work on that tricky areas first. Just pulling that what we started down, expanding this. Sometimes when I'm drawing things that are growing out of it, I like to use more organic shapes. It looks like it's, I don't know, liquid pouring out or something or mutating. I think for here, we can just do one more where there's just a little bulge there. Then again, just go on about halfway between the two A's. We can join the top of the T fully at this point and maybe just have a little notch there to not forget about that thing. I'm going to make this almost completely straight. Then we can start to match the counters and now we can drop this down to go halfway. I think this might be enough. We can check our progress by turning the frames back on and we can scroll through them. Cool. I think that's actually enough. One thing you can do, is change this to ping-pong and then it'll go back and forth. So we can see the movement without it changing at the end. With ping-pong, it'll go to the end and then reverse. We've got these three more frames. Remember, we did our loop. When you morph two words back and fourth, you want to hold on each of the words for a bit, so that you can actually read them. So it's not constantly moving. To do that, what we want to do is duplicate our loops a few times. Our title ones, illustrator, we've got A, B, and C. I'm just going to make, I would say five of these and then see how that works and see if we need to do more. I'm just going to duplicate each of these five times and then I'm going to drag them in order. Now we want to do the same thing with our name. Let's make a bunch of those. As you can see, we maxed the layers that were allowed. You can actually get more by adjusting your file size if you need to. If we go to crop and re-size. So we changed it to 2,000 pixels and then hit done, the resampling, and I'll resize our canvas. Now we should be able to add more frames. Click on three, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate, duplicate. There we go. Try these down into order. As you can see, because we multiplied our loops, you can actually read my name and the title. With the ping-pong setting, it goes back and forth so that it's a constant loop and never resets. Just a fluid little loop.
14. Morphing Your Logo: Part 3: You ever want to turn your name into a skull? I'm here to show you how. I drew this little skull here, and I thought I would do an example where I morph part of this into the skull, and then back. I think what I'm going to do is probably change my last name into illustrator, and then have part of my first name morph into the skull. The first thing I'm going to do here, as I work this out in front of you, is I'm going to go to my layers and make sure I only have one of my three repeated name loops turned on. I'm going to bring the opacity down to use as a guide, and then I'm going to move the skull somewhere. Thinking maybe I'm going to put it over here, and then maybe I can do something with the space next to it. Since I don't really know exactly what I'm going to do, I'm just going to make a new layer and try to sketch something out. When I'm sketching, I have a hard time not using a brush that looks like a pencil. I am going to use this Hamrick ink brush, which actually isn't a pencil, but it reminds me of a pencil, and it's got some texture to it, and then I'm just going to grab blue as a color, and going to map this out. I'm going to do illustrator again, but I'm going to morph just my last name into it. I'm going to map this out, I'm going to tuck the two L's again, because I like the way that looks. A little happy accident that the S lined up, but I might be in for a rude awakening over here if we run out of space, so let's try to work this out. This is a good reason why I like to just write it out simply, because sometimes you realize that you did not give yourself enough room. It's better to find out at this stage than when you start actually trying to draw something good. I'm just going to squish this down and bring down the opacity, so that I can still just map this out better. I'm not going to try to draw it better yet. I'm just going to try to get the letters to be consistently sized so I can get a feel for how much space I need. We can delete the old one, and now we know what we're working with here. I'm going to bring this opacity down, and do a new layer. I'm going to try to make it a little more fun and feel more in line with the lettering from my name. Let's try to find some ways to use the space better. I'm thinking maybe I work on this T and then we can utilize the space underneath it, to try to tuck the letters a little bit. Maybe pull the R down so it's like the R in my first name, and I can make that A in that space, and pull this T over. Now we're starting to make it feel like my first name, and we're saving some space. I like the idea of making it small, get a little bit bigger, and then get small again, and it helps with space. I can make this R a little smaller up here, but still match the line of the K there. This is already feeling more in line with my name, so that's pretty cool. I think while I'm here, I will tuck this S. Make the I there a little bit smaller like we were doing on this side, so it has this flow. I think that's looking pretty good. I will now maybe turn off my name, so that I can just see this shape a little better, and see if it has the flow that I want. Sometimes what I'll do is make a new layer and make a guide, so that I can be more specific with the shape that I want with the baseline. Maybe something like that. We turn that down. We can redraw it with that baseline in mind, so we can have the I go down to that line, then the L's. I think that's looking a little bit better, though I think it's a little too perfect, and I want it to have a little bit more of that playful up and down vibe that my name has. What I'm going to do now is actually duplicate one of those and then turn it on and just make it smaller, so that I can use it as a visual reference. What I'm trying to do is just have it keep the same flow but not be so perfect, so it looks like it's making a shape. What I like about what I did with the name is it has a flow to it, but it's not perfect. There's different baselines. Doesn't look like it's following a path. The first thing I'm going to do is not be so particular with these L's. So I'm going to let this one come down and not bend to match that line. I'm not going to be perfect with the heights on the two sides of the U, just like on the H up there. I'm going to let the first one to be a little shorter, and I'll let this T come up a little bit higher and I keep the S similar in baseline to the U, so it's not as much of a dramatic slope. Same with this R. Actually, I'm going to leave the T being a little bit longer. I think that'll break up that baseline a little bit. Let me exaggerate that R a bit more. I don't like how the T and the R are fitting together there, so what I'm going to do is connect them, and then erase the space between them, so that it's like what's happening there. Actually, I think this R should be a little bit shorter to give it a better rhythm. Let's compare the two. Yeah, so this one has the energy that my logo has, whereas this one feels too forced into that curve. Think this was a good step in getting me to there, but that is more in line with what I'm looking to do. Now I was thinking it might be fun to have this skull, maybe say something. I was thinking about having him say the word designy, because I feel that describes my illustration. It's a bit of a designery illustration. That's because I incorporated a lot lettering and I have a background design. So, need a new layer, and I'm going to sketch out a word bubble or something. Fits in there pretty nicely, and then do a new layer, and going to put the word designy in here, just like always I'm just going to write it out quickly. I think I'm going to put it in quotes. Putting things in quotes is sometimes funny, especially when it's a word like designy, which sounds like hiney, and hiney is a funny word. Is that how you'd spell designy? Think so. Maybe it should be a hyphen? No. I think it actually doesn't matter because it's a goofy skull thing that we're designing. I'm going to merge the bubble and designy together, and then I'm going to be redrawing both of them. I think I'm going to keep this simple, and then a little speech tail. Is that what is called? Speech tail? That doesn't sound right? I'm going to tighten this up.
15. Morphing Your Logo: Part 4: Now that I have this tightened up, I'm going to start the morph. I'm going to go and turn on animation assist, and then I turn on one of my name frames. Select that one, and then go to "Add Frame" so that I have a frame in between them, and I'm going to make sure that my opacity is back all the way up on my name otherwise it won't show up, with the animation assist because it automatically brings your opacity down. Now we can see our two different situations here. We have to figure out how to get my name in red to the green illustrator lettering. Then we've got to deal with the skull up here. That's actually going to be a little bit easier. Let's just dive right in and work on the lower part first. Just like before, we're going to try to get these to be closer to each other. You can go in and figure out what letters can work together in terms of morphing. For example, it probably makes sense for the K to become both the O and the R, because there's more letters in Illustrator than there are in Piascik. What we'll do here, is start transforming the I-L-L into the P. Let's start by making this line of the P a little bit smaller and a little bit skinnier. Again, we're trying to make progression, getting it closer each time,. You can see this piece sticks out and we're trying to get closer to here, so pull that in a little bit. If you're confused, and it's hard for you to see how this could work, one place to start is to go and trace where they're overlapping because those are spots that they both share. You know that those are going to stay the same because they exist in both places. Like this area filled with black exists when it's my last name or Illustrator. Once you've drawn where they overlap, you can go in and focus on the red areas where there's no green. Those are the areas where you need to get rid of that completely. Because this is an animation, we want it to happen smoothly and not look like something disappeared. You need to do it in steps. So one thing you can do is, simply make it a little bit smaller. For example, this thick line of the P right here, you can go in and make it thinner, and then the next time they get even thinner until it's gone. We can do the same thing here. Another thing you can think about is the green areas, and you know that we want to get closer to those. While we're making those areas thinner, maybe we can make it look like that extra letter material started to come down into the spot. You can almost think of it as this amount of letter material, and we're moving it from one spot to another. We can fill in the areas where they overlap, and because this green part is so thin where they're not overlapping, I would go all the way over to that. That's enough within the margin of error of the wiggle that you won't even see it. Now that we didn't overlap, let's go in and get it a little bit closer to where the red is so it doesn't look too jarring. I think we'll take this leg of the A to become this part of the U. We can start by pulling that over a little bit and making a little bit shorter. We can even pull some of this over to start that connection. Now we've got the rest of this A, and we know that we need to get to this S. I think this side of the A can become the S. You can see there's already this similarity. So what I would do is, maybe do a halfway point between these two things. Then maybe we can have a thin line connecting that A crossbar so it doesn't completely disappear altogether. We can shorten this A leg, maybe bulge it out a little bit to start to make the S. Same up here. Then extend that out, or moving that A but not making it too crazy that we can't see what happened. You can flip back and forth and see if it's too much. As long as you can see the relationship between the two, it's usually okay let's jump to the end. That way, we don't run out of letters or something like that. I'm thinking that these, the K will become the O and the R. We can start doing where they overlap. It can move into place over here. Maybe we can start to make this wider. Maybe we can start the opening of the, R there where there's no overlap of the red. What we need to do now is draw connecting lines. So it's not a complete change, and can pull this out a little bit if we want, and then come in and draw some of that red back end, so it's not a complete change. We can put some into the green if we want. We've got T-R-A-T in Illustrator and then we have S-C-I. I we'll do is morph the C into the R because they already feel pretty close. The S into the T, and then we can make the I have the A and the T into the I. What we'll do is split this I up, so we can start by making it a little bit wider and then putting a separation, like it's splitting open. What we can do here is pull the C over, and flatten that edge a little bit and pull the leg down and bring it closer to where it's going to be in the green spot. Here we can have this stick out a little bit as like a start to pull that leg down. Let's pull this part of the C in a little bit so it can eventually shut to make the opening of the R. Now we need to make this S become the T. So we just pull this part up, straighten out a little bit and then slowly start to straight in the S. Maybe let's focus on this word and then come back and do the rest. Let's add a new frame. We'll start where we left off. Again, we're going to make this red closer to the screen. This overlap is very thin. Let's go straight there, and now make that red space even thinner, and these are close enough that we could probably join them. Sometimes if there's a dent like this, have the dent barely there, just inside it. This is enough that we can pull it in. This, we can make it almost there, but have a little bit of that curve so there's that visual reference. Then let's pull this down a little further and start to curve it out a little bit. Then what I'd like to do about these thin areas is thin it out even more. But a way you can add some energy to the animation is by putting some little pieces, like little splats. They'll give the animation almost a liquid-y feel, like it's liquid-ing, is that a word? Splatting into into place. This is close enough that we can make this the U, right off the bat. I would pull this, and if we want, we could do that same splatty-thing. Pull this over a little bit, push that out a little bit, so that you get rid of this block a little bit, and morph it more into this separation lines where it's breaking away. It's already starting to look like the word illustration or Illustrator. Pull this over, curve this in, then try to straighten this out even further. Again, we're moving it a little bit at a time, getting it closer to where we need to be, from green to red. Closing this gap a little bit more bringing it in. It's a little bit trickier, this is the one that we were splitting the I into the two letters. Let's continue that split, move this over. Then we can start to split to the bottom again, and start to put in that middle part of the I. Bring this part of it over a little bit and then start to spread the top out before the top of the T. Over here we can continue this movement, bring it over. Then have a little bit of that area, and it can have this start to separate here. The counter of the R, we can start to make those line up. Add a frame, and you can see each step we're closer and closer. This is close enough that we can do it all the way. In order to make this splatty stuff look cool and actual liquid-y, in the animation, we have to keep it undulating, but make it smoother, like it's dissolving and disappearing or dripping away. Make that line even smoother and then make some smaller dots. You have a drip situation. You're wanting to slowly get rid of the material to letter meet, if you will. You can have it dripped down if you want. Sometimes having two pieces split there gives a cool effect. Let's say this U is good. Move that a little bit. When there's dots, you can make smaller versions of them and lower them, so they're dispersing. Have that look like it snapped. Go halfway between again, then expand that area that we were starting as a counter. This one is good, I would just finish this up a little bit, some scene things, some little dots, can separate this more now. Separation stuff there. You can scroll through here and you can see it happening. As you can see, the letter transformation is there, we just want to, at this point, resolve some of these little transitions. What we do is just a few more thing. Just a few little pieces to make it end the natural way. Anywhere there is more red, it's a good place to do that thing, to make it look a little more fluid. Let's play this. You can see that those little dots add a lot to it, looks fluid. Let's go back to our morph frame and let's morph the C into the skull. I'm thinking that, instead of morphing this directly into the bubble, I'm thinking, let's morph into the skull and then have the bubble pop out. Let's just push this C over to the shape of the skull and then squish these other letters down. Instead of adding a new frame, we're just going to turn on the next in our morph, turn off the name frame. Go ahead and bring this up, the rest of the way to the skull. I can pull this down. Let's keep a thick line. It's like the line of the C, but it's getting thinner as it goes out to the edges. Already we have stuff that shares both spaces like this extra line. You just pull that up like that, here for the teeth line. What we can do here is, instead of having it just get thin, we can have it follow the teeth line, and then maybe we can put this eye line in there. Let's do a little smear trick here. A smear is, if you draw one continuous shape merging two things, your eye will see it as one movement. It's a fun little magic trick to save some frames and make something happen in a shorter amount of time. Let me show you what I mean. What we're going to do here is, let's draw this one leg of the H, and let's trace this eye, and what we're going to do is connect these two. I'm just going to make a line where it's going to move into that shape. Just bring the rest of H in as well. Then for the rest of it, let's just mush it even more, let's just get it to be a straight of a line as we can. We can actually push that a little bit more. We can turn off that frame, and then click on our next one. At this point, we can draw the outline of the skull. Let's just fill in this stuff. We can use the smear thing from the eyes, by just minimizing it. We can use the rest of this part of the H to make the other eye. Since we had that H covering all this area to get time to just pop in things that could have been behind it, so maybe the start of the nose could be there. We can finish up this line, and let's just make this outer line a little bit thicker still, to make the transition a little bit more natural. We start to have these things start to open up here, then we can start bringing these lines up, and can bring that line in because it was obscured. Let's turn off the previous frame, turn on the next one. Most of it is already here, I'm just tracing it, then I'll go back in and add in where I need to. I think we can make this splat going real fast, like it's being slurped in, if you will. I can just do something dramatic like that, like it's going in. You can make that line a little bit thinner. Let's just try and see how it does. I think that it actually works pretty well. Since we're going to need a few more frames, we're going to need to draw Illustrator a few more times. Let's go back to this frame, and then turn on that frame. I am going to work on the rest of this more. First things first, I'm going to trace over the skull. Now I can go back here and just finish up this squivering line. What I'm going to do is make it a bit smaller, have it come in like this, and then just add some little splatty dots, and that would make that transition a little more fluid. We can also start to make this bubble come out. What I'm going to do is have it to start as a little first thing coming out like that. Now, we can finish up this skull. Just a few more little things there to resolve that. Now, let's bring this bubble way up. We can go pretty big here. I think, I'm going to have the words already in it. Because it's going to change so dramatically in size, you don't have to worry too much about it looking exactly like it's going to. I'm just going to put this in here, almost like it's too big for it, and then it'll stretch out as it gets bigger. I'm going to bring it almost all the way there for this one. Let's use the smear thing I talked about to join these letters together. Let's start at this lower D, then bring it up almost all the way to the big one. The smears look super weird as you're drawing them, but they somehow magically work. You won't be able to bring all this stuff back, because there's going to be some overlap. Now, all we have to do is draw this designing bubble two more times. We have all of our frames here, we're going to have to repeat some of these so that you can actually read it, but we created a playlist. I'm going to put it on ping-pong, so that it goes back and forth, so there's no weird gap. Of course, I think having the bubble pop up separately is a nice visual element, because it gives it a couple of steps to the animation. What I would do now is just go ahead and duplicate a few of the frames with just my name, so that it stays up a little bit longer, but to be honest, I didn't think that it needed a ton more. I'm going to just try doing three. I'm just going to put these in order. Again, we might just do one little touch. Add to this one factor, we can put some eyeballs in the skull to make it even goofier. I have to change the settings here, because the normal way this works, we can't see what's underneath the black, because it's on multiply setting. Let's see how that looks. Yeah, that adds just enough. I like that they show up right as the bubble pops out.
16. One More Morph: Now that I walked you through those two morphs, I'd like to walk you through one more, a little bit quicker, that's a little more simple. This version is an embellishment, but it still has a bit of a morph vibe to it. For this one, all I did was as I was tracing my logo, I just used a zigzag line. As you can see I'm going around the edges and following the lines but I'm just drawing a zigzag for my line to the whole thing. When I get to the second frame, I do the same zigzag, but I alternate where the points are. I just start it in a different spot so that the points end up in between the points and the other one, so when this plays back, they sort back and forth and gives a cool effect. I do the first one with the points one way, but in another frame with the points in between the point and the first one, and then I duplicate that first one, so it goes back and forth real quick, and then add that to our three frame loop. This is only two more frames being drawn, but I feel like it adds quite a bit to it.
17. Exporting and Conclusion: Although I've mentioned exporting our animations in a couple of the other lessons. I wanted to just recap a little bit here, specifically because it can be a little confusing. So there's two main options. There's GIFs and there's MP4's, and each have their own purposes. A GIF is a graphic file that can loop a series of images, whereas an MP4 is a video file. When you export a GIF and preview that image, it will loop forever just as it does in our preview when we're working in Procreate. When you export an MP4, your animated loop will play through once and then stop just like a video clip would. This isn't necessarily ideal when you want something to loop indefinitely. In those situations, a GIF is what you want. However, currently Facebook and Instagram won't let you post a GIF directly. In those situations, you'll need to post an MP4. The good news is that even though an MP4 file doesn't natively loop, when you post an MP4 on Facebook or Instagram, it automatically loops just as a GIF would. Once you're in Procreate, it's pretty easy to explore your animation. So as you can see here, I have my animated loop. Everything is good to go here. I don't want to have a background on this, so I'm just going to make sure that I turn off the background. I'm going to click on the tool icon on the top corner and I'm going to choose "Share," right in the middle. As I mentioned we've got a couple options. We've got animated GIF, animated MP4. There's other options here but we don't need to worry about those for now. The two easiest ones are GIF and MP4. So if you want to do a GIF, all you do is click on animated GIF. Here you'll see a preview. You've got this transparent background options. So if you don't need it to be transparent, you can leave that unchecked. But if you want it to be transparent, for example if you want to put this on your website or if you want to put it on something else, you could potentially overlay it on video, which I did for some of the things in this class, you would do transparent background. As you can see, we have our animation here and it's just on dark gray because that is what color the background is. You can control your frames per second here, but I find you're best doing that in the animation timeline, and that's it. So we hit "Export" and it's going to make our little GIF file and we'll have the option of saving it onto our iPad or camera roll or you can go ahead and save it to Dropbox or something else. The other option is the animated MP4. So this is what you're going to need to do if you want to share it on Instagram or Facebook or any platform that doesn't allow GIFs. So you'd just click MP4 and you would just do the same thing as we did before. We don't have the background option, but since I have it turned off, it's defaulting to a transparent background. We would just hit "Export, " we hit "Save Video, " and then I'll just show you what this looks like. So as you see here, the MP4 file will play through once and then stop. So if we click on it, you can see that it's about five seconds and it's just one loop. So if that's all you want, that's fine. But again, if you were going to post this on Instagram or Facebook, it would automatically loop, just like our animated GIF would. So now with the animated GIF, you'll see that this will just loop back and forth forever because it's not just a movie clip, it's a graphic that is just constantly looping through the frames within our animation. Another application for this thing is overlaying it on top of video. All the animations that you may have noticed in the class videos were done this way where I just exported one of my animations with the transparent background and then I was able to just place it on top of my video. So I worked in Adobe Premiere to put the class together. I could just take one of these GIFs and just import it into Premier and drag it onto my timeline and just lay it on top of the video and it would play the loop. You can do this with both an animated GIF or an MP4 in Adobe Premiere. But in some other video software applications, you may need it to be a video file. In that case, you would just use an MP4. I hope this class showed you how much a little movement can bring your logo to life. There's endless possibilities and I hope you continue to experiment with what you've learned. Doing simple animated word morphs, like the ones we did in this class or how I got started with animation, since then has evolved into a regular part of my client work. Throughout the exercises I've shown you a bunch of ways to create your own hand-lettered logo type, and add some movement and excitement with only an iPad and the Procreate app. To recap, we learned about the importance of brainstorming and research to create a logo that matches your sensibilities. We talked about collecting reference and taking inspiration from them without directly copying them. We dove right into animation by doing some exercises, where we created an animated loop, starting with fonts. We did a whole bunch of sketching, playing around with combining letters together, making paths and frameworks to use as guides, and we also tried some options using shape to help form our designs. After that, we narrowed down our sketches to our favorite one, tightened it up and made our animated loop giving it a fun vibrating wiggle, that became the starting point for the embellishments we added. Next, we created a few different morphs where we changed our logo into another word or title and even a spot illustration. That was a lot. Good job making it through all of that and I hope you had fun. I know I did. I can't wait to check out all your animated logos. So don't forget to share your work in the project section. Seeing your work will help inspire your fellow classmates and myself as well. Did this class inspire you to learn more animation? If so, the perfect next step would be to check out my other class, Frame by Frame Animation: Fun, Tips, and Tricks for Non-animators. In that class, I'll expand upon a lot of the stuff we learned in this one and show you how you can go even further, and just as in this class, you won't need to learn any fancy new animation software. That class is structured around Photoshop and Procreate as well.
Chris Piascik, The illustrator formerly known as designer.
