Simple Motion Graphic Logo for Business with After Effects

So you've always wanted to add a sweet little motion graphic with your logo, but you're not sure how easy it is to do? Stick around, I'm gonna give it a shot for my first time. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This is Dan from millennialmotivator.ca, helping you learn how to create, engage, and inspire. If you're new to the channel, go ahead and click that subscribe button down there, the little bell next to it. You'll get notified when my next video goes live. For today, it is that create day. I am looking to throw out a video here to help people understand how to create a quick, simple motion graphic with their logo. Now, I've never done this before. I'm going to dive in. This is my first one. Uh, video reel is something that I had to learn. There's a lot of different video components that you're going to have to learn as you dive into things like YouTube, LinkedIn video, Twitter, but more and more entrepreneurs and small businesses have to get used to using video effectively. So one of the simple, really classy ways to just jazz up your video is to have a great motion graphic with your logo. So I figured why not? I had to build it anyway. I might as well build it here with you. So step 1, let's head over to After Effects. Okay, so how's this gonna work? Well, basically I wanna take my existing logo that looks like this, and I wanna animate it, give it some feel to it. Nothing too flashy, too in-depth. I don't wanna spend more than let's say a half hour making this happen. So let's see what we can get done. I'm going to take this logo and start to bring components of the logo over into After Effects. So let's go. Okay. To get the ball rolling, we're going to pick new composition here. So you've opened up After Effects. Now you pick new composition. We've got a blank workspace to work with. I've titled the project logo. And now what I need to do is I need to start building in assets that I'm going to use for my logo. So the text isn't really a big problem. I've got the text installed into my computer. So that's simple. I don't need to pull that in, but the red background, that red square, that I like to use. I've got to import that in. So we're gonna do that real quick here. Just gonna grab it, import it, resize it here a little bit, just shift it around, make sure that it's, it's kind of flush and center. I want that to be kind of the backboard of what I'm doing here on the project. Okay, so just minor little tweaks here and there, nothing too major. Okay, so now that we've done that, we've, we've reassessed where we want that square to be on the backboard. Everything looks kind of nice and centered. It's the shape that I want, the size that I want. Now we've got to start to bring in some of the text components on this. Okay? So simple way to do that is to just right-click, add text, and that's going to pop in there. You can easily adjust it that way, or you can select the text tool in the top. Either one works. So what we're going to do here is we're going to start with matching up our M's onto the logo itself. So all I'm doing here is typing real quick. Here's one M. I'm gonna hit Ctrl+D to duplicate that. Bam! Pull that over. I'm gonna have 2 great-looking M's here, and that's a fantastic place to get this started. Okay, so just that simple. Bam, bam, enter it in, and we are there. What's next? All right, so now we've got the 2 M's there. Now clearly the logo does like to differentiate between the white and the black, so all I do is I quickly switch over the color by using that color palette on the right-hand side. There, no problem. Select the whole thing, reposition it, make sure everything looks kind of nice and flush. Now note that I am leaving a portion at the bottom because I do plan to add additional text to the bottom. Now throw in a simple block text to the back and bam, we're off and running. We've got this great little black section to block it off and move these letters in. Next, I've taken these 2 awesome little letters and I've added some touch points to And I mixed up the recording there a little bit, so you're not gonna be able to see every step of the way, but essentially what I did was I created 2 anchor points, one saying start here, one saying start here, and then reposition those into the middle a couple seconds later. And it gave that kind of fun flip feel to it, right? So really all I did was I set those 2 starting points off the, off the grid entirely, And then move forward a couple of seconds, reposition them to where I wanted, and that'll create a second anchor point. All you have to do is click play and bam, they flip like that. Now, to get that kind of rotating motion, it's the same thing. You use your rotation selection. You can do the same way as you did with your position. Go to where you want to start. I set on both sides to one side, it's -350 to the other side is positive 350. That's That way they get a bit of a different feel as they flip in. And then you just create the second point to where you want them to go to back at 0. And that gives it that really nice feel of flipping in. Now, what I'm doing here is I'm trying to add the additional text into the bottom of the space. And so while that animation of those 2 logos flipping in is really nice, what I'd like to do is have something that clearly defines what that MM means. All I'm doing right here is I opened up another text block, putting in millennial and motivator. Obviously with that black and white, I like how that's feeling and that's meshing. So I'm going to recolor the second font to black and then we're off and running. Now we've got this really nice crisp looking image that I'm happy with as far as the amount of time that I'm willing to put in on this. Now what I would like to have happen here with this text is what I want is for there to be some motion to that as well. I don't want just the M's to swerve in. I'd like to have that text move up or down. So right now it's gonna be that same process that we did before with the M's where we select a position and then a second position and allow After Effects to kind of populate that movement for us. We're gonna do the same thing with Millennial Motivator, but this time instead of using a spin effect, what I'm gonna do is mess with the opacity and the position. So same thing, start a position off the screen and And then I'm going to move them up while at the same time changing the opacity, which is how transparent the letters are, from 0 to 100 as it moves. So the original starting point will be off the screen with 0 set to the opacity. And that means that it's going to be completely transparent. You can't see the letters whatsoever. Then as the movement happens, I want it to slowly appear. So what's going to happen is you're going to see these letters kind of move up and take form at the same time. Hopefully, if everything goes well, what we're gonna have happen is those letters are gonna move up at the same time that that spins in. It's gonna give this really nice cohesive visual that I can then add audio content into. Alright, so next up, it's all about picking out the sounds that are gonna go with this, because most great motion graphics have a little bit of audio in. Now, for myself personally, what I love to use is Epidemic Sound. I love that not only do you have this massive portfolio that you can choose from, you also have this great tool that all of the audio is common use. You pay for a license to use this, and you can use anything that's on here without worrying about getting a copyright strike on your YouTube channel or on Facebook, wherever. Nobody's gonna claim that these audio effects are theirs. So all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna, I'm gonna go through here, I'm I'm gonna listen for a couple different sounds. I think I want a whoosh or a clang or a clink. So all I'm gonna do is go through here, really quick easy search. You can see there's a whole bunch of categories that they have for sound effects, or you can just use the search bar, find what you want. But once we nail it down, I'm gonna listen to a couple different sounds here, then we're gonna pick a sound and we are off and running to piece that all together. Okay, I've selected my 2 sounds and now all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take those and import them into into Adobe Premiere, which is really easy. You just right-click, import, or you can drag and drop directly from where you downloaded. So once that audio is in there, now all I have to do is overlay it onto the track. Seeing as we're only working with a second, I want to expand that out a little bit here, and now I just want to place my audio tracks on there. Now I don't necessarily want the audio to be exactly synced up. I know that people that are professional motion graphics guys will have this down to the millisecond, but for me it just needs to have a good feel. To it as you run through the logo. So for me, I'm gonna just overlap it simply, make sure that I'm cutting it off where I want the video to end so that the audio doesn't run long afterwards. And once that's done, I want to pair those sounds. So I want that initial sound that I picked, and then right at the end, just another little sound to kind of complete the feeling of it. And really guys, that's it. Now I just export and it's good to go. And the logo ends up looking something like this. That is it for today, ladies and gentlemen. I hope that this helped. If you have any questions whatsoever, feel free to ask down in the comments below. I'd love to hear whether or not you think that this is something simple that you'd be able to get done. If not, I'd like to know what I could help pull out a little bit more and help you figure out. It definitely wasn't as hard as I thought it was gonna be. It was fairly quick and easy if you're familiar in any way with using Premiere. It was very intuitive. I was able to pick it up very, very quickly. Epidemic Sound makes that audio really easy. And all in all, I think I finished with a pretty decent project. But again, let me know down in the comments below what your thoughts are. Hopefully this helps, and I will catch you next week with another great video. See you then.