Adobe Illustrator Tips for Motion Designers

In this tutorial, we'll take a look at the power of Adobe Illustrator for motion design projects.

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Timestamps:

Using the Blend Tool (4:40)

Editing a Blend (4:46)

Perfecting Your Paths (5:50)

Making Duplicates for Depth (11:56)

Fixing Legibility (14:47)

Locking Your Background (16:40)

Developing Non-Destructive Artwork (17:27)

Keeping Stroke Width Consistent (20:34)

Isolating Layers for Clean Edits (21:40)

Using Clipping Masks (25:15)

Using Offset Paths (27:15)

Creating New Color Groups (30:50)

Grouping Layers for More Control (31:45)

Shading (35:45)

Creating Halftones (36:55)

Adding Noise (43:45)

Importing Illustrator Work into After Effects (44:30)

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Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇

Jake Barlett (00:09): Hey, it's Jake. And in this video, I'm going to show you some of my favorite features of working inside of illustrators, specifically for motion design. Illustrator is one of those tools that I feel like a lot of motion designers dread opening up. They really don't want to get in there because the interface is different than after effects the tools behave differently. And you can get frustrated pretty quickly if you don't know what you're doing. And I really wish it wasn't that way because illustrator is one of my favorite programs. And you can really do a lot inside of it much easier than if you were making stuff right in after effects. So I'm going to walk you through making some artwork in a way that you probably haven't thought of doing before and then bring it into after effects and make it really quick animation.

Jake Barlett (00:49): So by the end of this video, hopefully illustrator will be your new best friend. Let's jump in. Now what I have here are some artwork that's halfway there. It's not complete yet, but I have an old Nintendo entertainment system, original Nintendo cartridge, complete with the dust cover. So I'm going to jump over to my layers panel right here. If your layers panel isn't open, just come up to window, down to layers, and now we'll open up and I have this first object, a group of that dust cover. So I moved that off and we can see what's behind it. Here's our cartridge. And it's incomplete. This is what we're going to do. I'm going to finish completing this artwork. And if you want to follow along with me, you can go ahead and download the source project files for this video where you'll have both this state of the artwork, as well as the final project files, once everything is completed, but here we go.

Jake Barlett (01:36): This is where I'm going to start. But before I go any further, I want to point out that I have my properties panel open, and I suggest that you have that open as well. So come up to window and go down to properties. This is just a really nice panel that basically brings up the most commonly used options for whatever you have selected. So, as I grabbed certain things, uh, it's going to update based on what my selection is and give me controls without having to dig through a lot of panels. So go ahead and open that up. Let's go ahead and get started with this section right here and add in some more details. If you're not familiar with the design of an NES cartridge, there are basically some sections in here. This is kind of like a little trench that has some dividing rectangles inside here.

Jake Barlett (02:17): So I want to add in some lines and you might think to, you know, grab the rectangle tool and then drag a rectangle out and then I can make this, you know, the same way. Exactly. And then grab my eyedropper tool. I am the keyboard and then sample the other line so that it matches the style. And then I would have to maybe duplicate this and I'm using my smart guides. That's what these pink highlights showing up are. If you go up to view smart guides, command U is the shortcut. That's very helpful for snapping things to each other, but I can continue doing this, you know, holding option, clicking and dragging on an object to duplicate it all the way down. But there's another message that I think is a little bit quicker and more flexible. One thing that you're going to hear say a lot in this video is that this is one way of doing things.

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