You put a lot of work into your videos and you want to make sure people know who created them. You’ll want to showcase your brand and help your logo stand out. If you watch any video or film content you will see this is important to most creators and just another reason why it should be important to you and your brand. Often you will see some type of animated logo sequence to start feature films or social media videos. In this post, we will show you 5 tutorials on making animated logos with After Effects for your projects.
Preparing your Logo for Animation in After Effects
It’s not always required but for the best animation effects, you may want to prepare your logo ahead of time. Breaking apart elements into various layers gives you more options in the animation. If your logo is a vector or illustrator file here is a great tutorial on how to prepare your logo in Adobe illustrator for After effects.
If your logo is a jpeg or png with a background layer on it you’ll want to remove the background. You can follow the below video on how to remove this background in photoshop.
You also can click here to follow a step by step breakdown of cutting out objects in photoshop
MAKING ANIMATED LOGOS WITH AFTER EFFECTS
Now that you have your logo prepared and the background removed you are ready for the following tutorials. Even if you kept your background the below walkthroughs may be helpful for you.
1. Dynamic Spiral Logo Animation
In this tutorial, Notiansans demonstrates how to make a spiraling logo effect using multiple mask motion blurs and keyframes. He takes you step by step through the process. You’re likely to learn some new tricks along the way that you can apply to some of your other projects.
2. Quick Logo Reveal
This effect is clean and elegant. A smooth motion and reveal will give your logo a nice intro. The project files for this are available for download as well.
3. Particle Logo Reveal
This is a neat particle reveal effect. This effect should work with just about any logo. There are lots of steps and may be hard to follow but it is worth trying.
4. Neon glow and move to music
Editing to music or a beat always adds a cool factor to your projects. This tutorial by C.M. de la Vega has a nice modern look and feel. The tutorial is easy to follow and will teach you the basics needed for creating visual effects that move with the music by using the Audio Spectrum plugin. He will also show you a few ways to reveal your logo.
5. Using Premade Templates
If you want a slightly easier option try using a premade template. Here are two easy to use After Effects templates from Filtergrade.
FALCON HUD LOGO REVEAL – Falcon HUD Logo Reveal is an astonishing unique project in Heads Up Display category. Created by 3Motional Studio.
Clean logo reveal – Clean logo reveal is a minimal intro/outro After Effects Template by Minna Picture. This AE Template provides you with an elegant and clean flat logo reveal. Includes 4 unique logo reveal animations.
As you can see there are many ways to showcase your logo. With a little time and effort you can make great animated logos with After Effects.
Read More:
- 9 Simple Steps to Professional Image Editing
- How to Create Infographic Elements in After Effects
- 8 Amazing Tutorials for Animating Text in After Effects