Creating an Animated Typeface in After Effects

In this series of tutorials, we will learn the steps for creating an animated typeface. We learn a lot at the beginning of the course on how to take the freshly designed typeface in Illustrator, and prepare it for animation in After Effects. This is one of the most valuable parts of the course, because knowing how to properly prepare your files will save lots of time in the end. Once we move into After Effects, we use several effects that are unique to shape layers, as well as a few standard transform style animations. We learn how to animate small details of the typeface ahead of time, so that they can be quickly swapped out for the still layers to make for even faster production. While we don't animate every single letter of the alphabet together, we learn all the techniques for creating beautifully animated letters which we then place in a composition. To top it all off, we end the training by learning how to render for, then create, an animated GIF of our type. By the end of this tutorial, you will know lots of tricks for saving time as you work through animating a typeface and you'll be ready to implement these techniques the next time you need some type in motion. Software required: After Effects CC 12.2.0.52, Illustrator 17.0.0, Adobe Media Encoder 7.2.0.43, Photoshop 14.0.