How I animate a simple UI using After Effects
My workflow on how to animate a simple UI.
My primary tool of choice to animate UI is After Effects. I know there are other tools available such as:
- Invision Studio
- Principle
- Flinto
But the one I feel most comfortable with and for the purpose that I’m creating these animations After Effects serves me very well.
Let's start with the design
I mostly make these animations for fun and the designs that I usually do are between jobs just to experiment with an idea that I had on my mind for a while.
I start by designing the first, second and last screens of the whole animation.
After I have the 3 main screens of the animation I start to design the in-between screens to have all the main frames of my animation done and with that, I can visualize in a better way what I’m aiming for.
Exporting the assets
When I have my design done it’s time to export all the assets needed to be imported into After Effects.
Because I always use Figma for the design, I export all my vectors in SVG and them I open Illustrator to make them x2 and export again in .AI
Let's animate
Whenever I’m animating something I always follow the principles from the Fibonacci numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 –) to have a more organic animation.
I usually start my animation on frame nº 8 so when you are seeing it gives you time to understand what’s going on.
After I have all my animation done I export and upload to Dribbble.
Here's the final result:
You can see the animation in better quality here:
https://dribbble.com/shots/7050294-My-Movies-Animation
Final considerations
This quick article was not to teach you how to animate using After Effects.
I wrote this to explain how you can visualize a simple animation from start to finish. If you want to learn on how to animate UI I recommend
Thanks. :)
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Let’s talk!
Victor Berbel — UI/UX Designer — victorberbel.work
