Week #33 / 52 – Animated Typography: Initial & Swooshes

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More 3D typography, but 2D looking...

This week, continuing on my challenge to learn 3D art with Cinema 4D, I combined a few things that I wanted to do:

- experiment with animated typography

- experiment with fluid, swooshy typography

- try out more workflows with the new mobile applications that Adobe released at Max 2014

- experiment with the Creative Cloud market assets

For the first two, I ran into a great tutorial by Chris Schmidt at Greyscalegorilla on creating wisps of wind with MoSpline. Chris is a really awesome tutorial author in that he packs a ton of information and tips in a very short amount of time, and not just because he speaks pretty fast :-). So I learned about MoSpline and how to convert a spline like the one on the left to the one n the right with MoSpline:

Adding animation in Cinema 4D is fairly easy in terms of which parameters to tweak, but finding the right pace and values for the animated parameters can be pretty time consuming.

I exported the animation frames to TIFF files, which I turned into a video in After Effects before creating a final compositing and animated GIF in Photoshop.

But what about the new mobile applications and the Creative Cloud Market assets? Read on :-) (below).

Using Adobe Illustrator Draw and sending drawing to desktop Illustrator

Adobe has a new set of really great mobile tools (disclaimer: I work at Adobe, so of course i am biased :-).

For this project, I used some very basic features of Adobe Illustrator Draw. I really enjoy the tool and for this project, I simply used the French Curve tool which let me very easily create the curves I wanted (see screenshot below) which you can then send to your desktop Illustrator (I find the experience really nice, the file just opens up in Illustrator, no need to worry about file transfers).

iPad template by PAGE Interactive Sp.j.

Note that I could have done the same work with Illustrator Touch on the Surface Pro 3, because it has a touch workspace and a french curve tool as well. But I was on Apple equipment for this project, so I went with the iPad / MacBook Air combination.

Using Creative Cloud Market Assets

With the Creative Cloud Market assets, there are lots of "Mock-up" PSDs (among other things) in which you can simply insert your own content. I have put a few examples below. These are really handy to test out how something will look in context.