Every year brings an opportunity for you to review your career progress. You want to evaluate and determine – where you are in your career, what is working, what isn’t working and what needs fixing. Maybe you started with offering article writing services and later learned graphic design.
Now, you want to quit your 9 to 5 grind (and start your own business), come up with better professional networks for your article writing service, or take up new opportunities. That way, you will easily get rid of things that don’t make sense to you – and adopt new goals, ideas and plans of action. One of the things you can consider is getting into motion design and animation. You could also incorporate Royalty Free music in the background for after effects.
In the post, we are going to quickly look at other avenues – specifically animation and motion design – that you might want to consider to ‘add more glamour’ to your graphic design career.
Why it matters?
The love for good design must get into your bloodstream. Graphic design proves to be trickier compared to your usual article writing service. It requires more input.
Yes, you may have created corporate identity prints, brochures, flyers, etc. But, if you want to take it further and venture into advertising, corporate videos, explainer videos, movie industry, TV, and more, then look for more knowledge.
It won’t happen overnight. Yes, you already have skills for creating good graphics. Besides, you know how a good thing looks like.
But, for you to ‘hack into’ those areas as a designer, you need to have the requisite skillsets. That is why understanding animations and motion design would be key.
Just to make things clearer for you
You might have heard the terms ‘motion designer’ or ‘motion design’. These terms, in a nutshell, describe animated graphic design. Motion design is a discipline that applies graphic design principles in video production and filmmaking through use of visual effects and animations. But you need to note that a motion designer, 3-D animator and a VFX artist are not the same.
Skills you need to learn
Before anything else, you need to get a feel of timing. Timing is everything in the game of motion design. But, perfection comes with practice.
Besides, you need to learn different principles for motion design such as overlap, anticipation and squash & stretch.
- Squash & stretch – The behavior of your graphics should convey what happens in the real world. Every object has some level of flexibility in their shapes as they move. The stretching and change in shape of objects as they surface and bounce along the way is what is known as “stretching” and “squashing” respectively.
- Anticipation – this refers to the preparation that you will undertake for the main action of any animated scene. It is distinct from different actions and reactions in motion.
- Overlap – these are techniques that help you to render movements in motion more realistically. That way, it gives the impression that your characters are following the natural laws of nature.
But most importantly, you need to keep your viewer engraved to the scenes. You need to lead their eyes to what matters. You should know how to make things pop, swoosh and whizz. And above all, you also need to learn how to transition in and out of scenes.
Tools you will need to get the job done
There are a lot of tools you can use for motion design. But the main software program used in the industry is the Adobe After Effects. This is a 2-D animation program that uses a layered timeline approach. It allows you to animate your graphic images in a layered manner. This doesn’t mean that you are going to dump you Illustrator or Photoshop skillset. You will need it to create graphics that work together.
Summing it up
If you are graphic designer and probably want to vary your work, you might want to consider motion design. Unlike article writing services, dubbing with animation exposes you to a skillset that will further your professional development. It will also open up more, and better paying opportunities.
