Regardless of whether you’re a graphic designer animating one of your logos or a motion graphic artist animating a customer’s logo into a grouping, realizing how to add motion to a logo while saving the first design is an extremely helpful skill. Corporate customers may have restrictions about what you may or may not be able to with the logo, in view of their style control. There might be guidelines for colors, dimensions, proportions, and so on.

So when you’re animating a logo, it’s good to know all the different ways to approach the job.

Animating logos for yourself or a client is a walk in the park with these four techniques for custom animations in Adobe After Effects.  

Separating the Layers in Illustrator

When you receive the logo file from a client, they are most likely send you a normal .jpg — if you’re dealing with someone unacquainted with design work. Ask them to send you the original .AI file.  Once you have the file opened in Illustrator, go to Object > Ungroup  to isolate all of the layers. Now to set it up for animation in AE, separate each layer, and place them into separate groups. If your client doesn’t have an .AI file, you can also isolate the layers in Photoshop.

Animating the Logo

When you have the layers parted, drag it into AE and import it as “Footage.”  It will show up as a single layer, so to change that (Right Click > Create > Convert to Layered Comp).  This will open up the composition with all the diverse layers. Drag all of those rudiments from that tab back to your main composition, and delete the original layer.

Since the entirety of the layers is separated, you can apply individual animations to each part of the layer. For this model, we’re going to spin them in from out of frame, scaling up to the perfect size in the centre. Select one element, and press S and R to bring up your scale and rotation adjustments. Create a keyframe for both, and slide it down your timeline. Presently, create a keyframe toward the start of the composition with a touch of rotation, and adjust the scale down to zero. Presently when you play it, that part of the logo will scale up and rotate into its original size.

Animating the Title

If you want to animate your text separately, you’ll need to create a new text file in AE. You cannot edit Illustrator files with as many options as AE titles. To make it easier, go to your logo in Illustrator and copy the text layer. Now, just generate a new text layer in AE, and press Paste.  Your text and font should import routinely. One of the cool features of AE text customization is the animate tab in the timeline. In this example, Noel selected the Enable Per-Character 3D effect for his text. This allows you to animate each letter individually, opening up new ways to introduce your logo text. Using that same animate tab, you can add Scale, Rotation, and Value to your characters to bring out even more variation.