How can designers effectively implement animation into their work? How will learning animation benefit a generalist designer looking to expand their inter-disciplinary skills?

Animation is a valuable tool for any designer. For Generalist designers, it can be especially useful in adding extra layer of engagement and dynamism. Animation is about the manipulation of time. Designing for key moments that add narrative, atmosphere and imagination.

Animation can be used within almost any field of design to further your visual communication. It captures the viewers focus more easily and allows you to present your design concept with storytelling.

What is Animation? How does it relate to time?

Learning how to use Animation in your design work allows you to create stories that can be used to explain your designs dynamically. It relates to time as it is about manipulating moments taken from a still image. 

For a Generalist, it adds another level you can add to your work that makes it more engaging and visually appealing. Animation overlaps amazingly with the other 12 Principles of Design in that almost all fields could utilize Animation to enhance the experience of the viewer.

For Graphic Designers it can be used to create atmosphere and energy in an otherwise stationary image, or for Industrial Designers it can be used to explain complex processes to a viewer, like how components fit together, the manufacturing or how the design functions.

People prefer to see animations compared to stationary images. The movement catches the eye and keeps the viewers focused.

In its merit, it can be used creatively to tell the stories you want to tell. It’s an amazing and  highly interesting form of Design. Its versatility makes it a great tool to have in your creative skillset. 

Types of Animation

There are multiple styles of Animation, each with its processes and levels of difficulty. In modern-day Animation, each style can be used collaboratively for efficiency and creative flair. 

One great example of mixing these styles of Animation can be seen in films like Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse.

Traditional Animation

Traditional Animation is the style of animation everyone may be most familiar with, especially if you’re an old millennial like me. Think of old-school Disney movies like Aladdin, the Lion King and who can forget Basil, the Great Mouse Detective. 

Traditional Animation uses still images placed in a sequence that when played together gives the illusion of motion. It used to be an incredibly time-consuming process, but it has been sped up through digital tools like Graphics tablets.

Traditional animation was a process that used celluloid sheets, known as cels, which were clear plastic sheets where artists would hand draw the characters and background. With each different cel there would be a slight adjustment and when played in a sequence would create motion.

While it’s not common today, it’s important to know some context to give you an understanding of how we ended up with the industry we have today. 

These animated movies used to take years to create. Each frame is hand-painted by a huge team of animators. Now with digital tools and software, a similar quality can be produced in shorter times with smaller teams.

Almost all current cartoons like Bob’s Burgers, the Simpsons, and Family Guy use the traditional style of animation but use more efficient digital techniques.

You can see the technique of cel animation being roasted alive at the beginning of Banksy’s creepy Simpson’s Couch Gag.

Vector-Based Animation (Flash Animation)

Vector-based Animation uses vectors to structure animations. For Generalist Designers, you’ll be familiar with using vectors in Adobe Illustrator. This style of Animation used to be known (back in my day) as Flash Animation.

Flash Animation was named after the Flash content format that used to be across the internet till the rise of HTML5. It was also named as such because the best software to create these styles of animations was Adobe Flash, which was repackaged as Adobe Animate to change with the better formatting for the internet.

Flash Animations of the early 2000s were incredibly common and were a game changer in that you could interact with the cartoon by adding buttons or linking it to pages on the internet. You could use buttons to determine the story of the cartoon, or provide access to information and create software (This was my first role in the Creative Industry!).

Vector Animations uses the positioning of vectors placed at different time intervals, and the motion that would take place between those moments was animated by the software. It removed a lot of the time required to create animations.

The best example of Vector Animation used today would be South Park. Comparing the time between Vector-based animation and Traditional Animation, it takes The Simpsons six months to animate an episode, it only takes South Park a week!

3D Animation

3D Animation is a style of animation that uses Computer Generated Images to create motion. This style of Animation was pioneered by the Toy Story franchise, which was the first introduction to 3D Animation on the world stage.

Models are made in 3D Design software and then exported in a 2D plane to create the movie. It allows for realism to be included in your animation style. 

As opposed to 2D animation, characters are designed in a 3D space and their movements are determined using Rigging. This is kind of like putting a skeleton and joints in your character that you can manipulate to show movement.

While the techniques for creating 3D Animation are quite different from 2D animation, they follow a similar process to get from the start to the end of the project.

Stop Motion Animation

Stop Motion is a very different style of Animation. It is a very time-consuming process but it has so much charm. The best examples of Stop Motion come from Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, and Robot Chicken.

The technique revolves around taking photos of small figurines and making small changes to the placement of their limbs and environment that when put in a sequence give the illusion of motion.

Making these small changes takes a huge amount of time. Films like 2023’s Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget took 23 years to make! The opening scene alone took 6 months.

Visual Effects

Another form of animation is Visual Effects, a term used within Special Effects. Visual Effects are used in movies to add animated elements to traditional films in the post-production stage, once all the filming has been completed. 

With Visual Effects, you can add explosions, animated characters, and backgrounds. It is highly used in today’s filmmaking industry. 

One of the best examples of visual effects comes from the Marvel movies. The explosions, the superpowers, and even the characters can be fully animated. These elements are added into the film around the actors and film set.

Why Generalist Designers Should Learn Animation

Now you know the different types of animation, you can learn how to use them in your work. These styles of animation have become more accessible than ever and are used across the creative industry.

Learning how to add animation to your work can make a huge difference in your career. For example, for Interior Design projects you can use 3D Animation to demonstrate your design idea to a client with high-quality renders. 

If you’ve looked at our Interactive Design series, you could export this animation into VR and allow the clients to see the room before any work starts.

If you are working on an Industrial Design project you could use 3D Animation to provide instructions or how components fit together.

For Graphic Design projects it can be used to elevate your stationery designs and gain the attention of viewers easier.

At Nollie Design, we want to show you that by including Animation in your creative skillset you add another level that allows you to express your designs. 

Another factor that should make you excited about animation in your design work is that the only limit is your imagination. 

What are the Risks of Learning Animation?

It is Time Consuming

Animation is a time-consuming process, especially if you’re animating a whole scene. It requires a lot of patience to animate a scene; if you’re animating a whole package, it will take time.

At Nollie we want you to understand the transferable skills between design fields, and there is no expectation to learn everything overnight. Instead, use these techniques as a tool you can add and build upon at your own pace.

Animation requires patience. If you set aside time to work on these projects, put on your favorite playlist, and you might find that the process can be very therapeutic.

Also with all the innovation around AI, new tools are about to become available that will rapidly speed up the animation process.

Learning the Animation Software

When you first open animation software, the interface can be very intimidating for first-timers. Thankfully once you understand the basics these skills transfer over.

For designers wanting to understand Animation for the first time, I would start with learning basic skills like keyframing and in-betweens. These tools impact the timing of your films, and understanding these will give you a path to learning more advanced software.

At Nollie, we recommend using Adobe Creative Cloud, as it is most common across the Design industry. If you’re starting, Adobe Animate is easier to pick up than AfterEffects.

Deadlines

It can be hard to factor in deadlines for Animation projects, as sometimes the work can be more complex than previously estimated.

To mitigate this risk, clearly outline your deadlines and goals with a Scope of Work contract which outlines your goals and time estimates to the client.

Having a good understanding of your level of ability also helps. The more you understand your capability with the software, the easier it will be to estimate deadlines and organize your time.

What Are the Benefits to Learning Animation?

Increase Your Visual Communication Skills

Using Animation allows any Designer a new way to convey their ideas visually. No matter what field of design you are in, you can use animation as a tool to develop better narratives around your work so people can understand it more easily.

One example of Animation being used to effectively convey ideas, is the Dropbox Explainer video. Dropbox is a complex file syncing platform and in it’s early stages as a start-up founder Drew Houston wanted to share his idea, but his prototype was far from ready to be launched.

Instead, he animated the Dropbox experience, showing how users would interact with his product as if it were the real thing. After the video he encouraged people to beta test his product. His beta waiting list went from 5000 to 75000 after the video’s launch.

This is just one example of how you can use animation to convey your ideas. With Generalist Design, we’ll be working across a whole spectrum of projects, but knowing you can use animation can allow you to explain your ideas clearly.

Versatility as a Designer

The more creative techniques you learn, the easier it is to use them in your work. By using Animation you are diversifying your creative skillset. 

If you want to become an interdisciplinary designer, then animation is a great tool that can be used within any design field to elevate the visual language used to convey the idea.

Being adaptable as a designer allows you to explore new creative opportunities and be prepared in an industry that constantly shifting with new technology, like Artificial Intelligence.

Increased Creativity

Adding more creative skills as a designer allows you to become more creative. You’ll understand the overlap between design fields, making it easier to switch between them.

Animation provides a new way for you to tell stories, develop characters, visual effects, or brand expression. With animation, you can develop new ways to explore complex topics in a way that static images can’t. 

Collaborative Opportunities

The more you understand the big picture of how these skills interlink, the bigger an understanding you’ll have of the creative process. This will allow you to explore new opportunities to collaborate and share a common understanding with the people you work with.

By becoming an Interdisciplinary designer, you’ll be able to talk with animators as your peers and grow your network. 

Improve Your Storytelling

Humans love stories. It forms cultures, creates myths and legends, and gives us ways to express ourselves. With design being able to share a story around your work allows people to understand it easier and build an emotional connection to the work.

By creating a story around your work you can share your idea. For example, let’s say you are a Fashion Designer, you can tell a story about how someone feels when wearing your design. You could use this to market and promote your show design.

They buy some new shoes and suddenly everything right, they’ve got their new shoes on and everybody’s smiling. You can show them slowly strolling in the sweet sunshine, and in the story, they might be running late but they don’t need an excuse to wear their brand-new shoes.*

You can use animation in your web designs, social media, illustration, motion graphics, force analysis simulations, or even animate your prototype to convey a message to the viewer.

Storytelling gives your work an emotional connection and a way for potential users, clients, etc to understand your work and the goals you set out to achieve.

This type of storytelling can be used to inform the viewer too. Using animation can break down complex topics into easily understood visuals. Take this manufacturing animation as an example. They’ve explained something in 20 seconds that would be complicated to understand from just images or text.

*Comment below if you got the reference!

Context of Animation

The story goes that Animation was created by a Gentleman’s wager over a horse. Yep, you read that right. We owe modern filmmaking to a horse.

In 1878 Leland Stanford, a racehorse owner, and Eadweard Muybridge, a photographer, were debating the topic of whether or not a horse lifts all four legs off the ground when it runs. Your typical pub chat.

Stanford would provide the horse, and Muybridge would photograph it running. Muybridge placed 24 cameras along the horse’s path, with each camera being activated by a trip wire

He would run those images in a sequence to determine once and for whether or not a horse lifts all of its legs while running. This sequence became known as “The Galloping Horse” and this was one of the first instances of filmmaking.

Around this time other Animators were beginning to use this concept alongside the new invention of the zoetrope to begin projecting the celluloid film for theatre projectors. By the turn of the century the beginning of animation as we know it was brewing. 

In 1914 Wilson McCay introduced the world to Gertie the Dinosaur, in a time of silent movies, but it was Felix the Cat by Otto Messmer that became the first famous cartoon character.

You can see a lot of Felix’s character design reflected in the next big cartoon star, Mickey Mouse. In 1928, Walt Disney released Steamboat Willie the first cartoon to ever be synced up to music. The synchronization between the character and music became a big part of Disney’s early success.

Not long after came the Fleisher brothers who were behind characters like Betty Boop and Popeye.

By the 1940s we were introduced to the next big thing in Animation, the Looney Tunes. These characters introduced mayhem and violence as a way of standing out against the crowd of do-gooders and cute singing animals found in Disney Films.

In the 1960s in Japan, the comic art known as Manga began to expand into the animated world through Anime on television. A style of animation that’s now arguably stronger and more influential than ever.

By the 80s animated films were proving to be difficult and costly to make, but old stories were repackaged for modern times with the Disney Renaissance Era with films like Aladdin, Hercules, and the Lion King, bringing a new life to the animation industry.

By the 90s we had the technology to produce fully 3D Animated movies, with Toy Story being released in 1992. It was also a great time for animation on television, as the Simpsons had begun the start of their golden age.

In modern times, animation has become so much easier than before. Where it used to take a team years to produce animated stories, with digital technology it is now a much faster process.

Vector Animation made things even easier and when South Park hit the scene it showed that people would watch lesser-quality animation as long as they found it funny.

Today, animation is so accessible and easy to try that it should be an added element for any designer who wants to have interdisciplinary skills. You can now use software to add animated elements to almost anything, even PowerPoint.

Having this added skill in your creative skillset will allow you to add more dynamic visuals and elements of storytelling within your work.

The Techniques of Animation

Storyboarding

Storyboarding is the technique of drawing out the story like a comic book. It is used to determine the scene and provide the director with an idea of what the animation should be doing and at what time.

For Generalist Designs you can utilize the overlap between illustration in comic books and storyboarding for animation.

Often Storyboards are simple sketches that can then be fleshed out again to provide more detail. 

Storyboarding allows the director to make creative decisions about what to display on screen and why. It then provides animators with an understanding of the visuals they need to produce.

Character Movement

Character Rigging is a relatively new concept brought about thanks to new digital animation software. Once you create your character you give them a digital skeleton that can be manipulated. 

By using keyframes you can digitally adjust your skeleton to be at one place at one time and move the skeleton for the next keyframe. The rig will keep the character’s movements as they should, and the software will create the Inbetweens.

With an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, you also get access to Adobe Character Animator which allows you to use Motion Capture to animate your characters.

Rotoscope Animation

Sometimes animating in a way that looks realistic can be pretty tricky to get right. The way people walk or run is especially hard for example. 

One of the techniques in animation used to make a more realistic understanding of motion can be found through Rotoscoping.

Rotoscoping is a technique that’s been used by Animators for almost as long as animation has been around. It requires filming a person doing the motion, then drawing over that person with the character’s design.

Once you know about rotoscoping you can see it everywhere. For example it was used heavily in the 1978 cartoon adaptation of Lord of the Rings and in films like A Scanner Darkly. But you can find it popping up in marketing and music videos.

Keyframes & Inbetweens

All Animation uses a technique of keyframes and Inbetweens, which is one of the main elements to animation being centered around designing with time.

A keyframe is a point in time in which you want to capture a moment. Keyframes can be used to demonstrate when a motion begins and when a motion ends. The motion in between is made up of Inbetweens. 

In traditional animation, the best animators were responsible for the keyframes, while the other teams hand-drew the in-betweens. With digital software, this is much easier than it used to be, but it is still time-consuming. 

With Vector Animation, the software creates the Inbetweens for you. Essentially you use a keyframe to say I want this to be here at this time and then to be there at that time, and inbetweens fill in the motion between those two moments.  

These Inbetweens have been shortened to the term “Tweens” in software like Adobe, but the principle is still the same.

Easing and Acceleration

Timing is everything in animation. Making things look natural and realistic can be done with Easing and Acceleration. Imagine a train pulling into the station, it has to come to a halt, it doesn’t travel to you and stop. The same goes for animated films.

Creating acceleration and easing between keyframes allows you to move to look more natural as the perceived energy of the motion slows before stopping or gets faster as it moves.

Let’s say you have a character about to punch a villain, the punch would start slow then get faster and faster until impact. The villains would feel the impact and then begin to accelerate as they fell over. The character’s hand would get slower (Ease) after the impact until it returned to the side.

With animation allowing for anything to be possible, this technique grounds the physics to something that we understand and relate to. If there was no Easing or Acceleration it would look odd and it would remove us from the fantasy.

Background Animation

Background Animation is exactly what it sounds. Adding animated elements to the background adds extra depth to the work. It gives a visual presence to nature, background characters, or even the weather.

Let’s say you are designing an animation sequence where its characters sitting in a crowded bar. By animating the background characters you provide more depth to the scene and add an extra layer of realism. If all the background characters were stationary, it would look really weird. 

Special Effects

Special Effects animation is about creating new animations into a previously recorded film. Understanding how to implement easy special effects can provide more information or atmosphere to a video.

You can create easy special effects sequences with Adobe After Effects. You can add explosions, digital displays or even just add text thats set to a fixed space within your video.

One of the biggest uses of special effects is Green Screening, which we see being used by content creators, film production teams and marketing. 

You can use special effects to enhance the narrative of your storytelling.

Camera Angles and Movement

Camera Angles will be used to show the viewer what is important. It shares many visual cues from Composition. 

Where do you want the viewer’s attention and how can you use the camera angle to show this?

In Traditional and Vector Animation the camera angles are kind of made up by using implementing the camera angles beforehand. What you put on the screen will be your output.

With 3D Animation as the character and environment are made within a virtual 3D space, you need to add the camera in separately.

Then you control the camera in the scene like a virtual film studio.

Transitions

Transitions play a big role in filmmaking and Animation. It’s a way of changing the scene or showing that a character has moved to a different location.

Transitions are good to know for design with a video output and will allow you to enhance your storytelling ability.

There are multiple types of transitions and each can be used to represent a different element of storytelling. We’ll go into transitions more in a later post.

Facial Expressions

Facial Expressions play a big role in animation and help portray how the character’s feeling. 

In animation anything is possible. We’ve seen many Disney films where the main characters are animals, and we don’t express our emotions in the same way. So you enhance the characters’ facial features to allow you to express that emotion.

One of the best ways to give your character facial expressions is by comparing them against your own in a mirror and drawing what you see. It’s very common to see people drawing characters and copying their faces as they draw them.

Secondary Motion

Secondary motion is the action that accompanies the main animation sequence. It’s the smaller elements of the action that can be used to express the character’s thoughts or emotions.

Let’s say you’re animating a character who is eating a burger, the main sequence is the action of the character taking the burger to their mouth. Secondary Motion would be adding elements like licking their lips before they take a bite, or some cheese dripping off of the burger. 

This adds extra elements to the story. You now know that the character is excited to take a bite and that the burger is filled with hot melting cheese. It provides a better context to the character and the emotions they’re feeling in a visual way.

Character Interactions

Character Interactions is the visual and verbal language between characters. Animating non-verbal cues that show the emotions and feelings of the characters. 

If you have two characters interacting and one is angry and the other is calm, it would be reflected in their body language and dialogue. One would be more explosive in movement, while the other would move slower.

Animating these character interactions can lead the way to exploring more aspects of storytelling in your work.

Squash and Stretch

Squash and Stretch is a very common tool used in Animation and helps to add an element of momentum to your work.

If you dropped a bowling ball and a water balloon. As the water balloon hits the ground there’s a split second where it flattens against the ground and the ball gets wider, whereas a bowling ball with its heavier mass would keep its shape more.

Animation is a lot about conveying things visually to the viewer. Using squash and stretch adds visual elements that help the viewer interpret what they’re looking at.

The Process

At Nollie Design, we want to show you that you can use your design process to be adaptable and allow you to expand your creativity to explore different projects.

Rather than learning each field individually, we recommend adapting your process to allow you to be more versatile, we call this the Polymathic Process.

With the Polymathic Process, you can learn the techniques used to create different design work and add them to your process so that you can use them when you want, allowing you to become like a design swiss army knife.

Brief Interpretation and Planning

The first stage of any process is the Planning stage. Once you’ve understood the brief, you want to make sure that you have plenty of time to work through your design process.

You can use planning tools to make sure that the work you produce is delivered on time.

The best plan is to work backward from your final deadline.

Research

Research is an underrated tool for any designer, but it’s a stage in the process that will allow you to provide reasoning for your actions during the design process.

The best form of research is to go out and meet people who are in the target demographic for the animation you’ll produce.

Concepts

Now we get to the good part, it’s time to start putting pen to paper and start coming up with ideas. This is the stage where we get to put all of our research and ideas onto paper.

In animation, this stage would cover things like coming up with a story, coming up with character ideas, or begin drawing your storyboards.

Development

The development stage for this principle relies on animating Keyframes. Between coming up with your storyboard and the final animation, you can include creating an Animatic. 

An Animatic is an animated storyboard, it takes the main images from your storyboard and puts them in an animation sequence where key timings, music, and dialogue are mapped out.

These key moments in the story form the basis for your keyframes. Then come the Inbetweens.

Once you’ve finished your Animatic it’s time to begin animating. At this stage you want to bring your animation close to it’s final result.

Detail

The Detail stage is adding in any extra elements that can enhance your final animation. This could be editing the lighting of your animation or adding special effects.

This is like your post-production stage if we’re using traditional filmmaking terminology.

Pitch

Finally your animation is done and it’s time for you to present it to your client.

Use your research to determine WHY something is the way it is. 

Promotion

Now it’s time to put your work out there! You’ll never get anywhere as a designer if you keep your work to yourself. Share your skills, put your work out there, and show what you can achieve. This will allow opportunities to come your way.

We recommend a showreel. This is like a video portfolio that you can use to demonstrate the different types of work you can do.

What Software Do I Need to Begin Animation?

At Nollie, we believe that Adobe is the best solution for Generalist Designers who want to work with a variety of different creative projects. Adobe is used across the creative industry and if you’re going to use it in a professional setting it would help to know the software from the beginning.

An Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription also gives you access to Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, other very important tools for designers who want to work between design disciplines.

In Animation, the most commonly used software are Adobe Animate and Adobe AfterEffects.

Adobe Animate

Adobe Animate is an easier software to get started with. It allows for the creation of simple traditional animation and vector animation. If you’re new to animation this is the one I would use to get my head around the basics. 

Animate still has some amazing features, it can make those animations suitable formats for the internet in HTML format. But it can also be used for turning your animations into game design.

Animate is best suited for 2D animation and simple animation styles.

Adobe AfterEffects

After Effects has much more capability as animation software, but due to its many features it has a steeper learning curve. But once you’ve learned the basics of AfterEffects there is far more you can do with that software than Adobe Animate.

AfterEffects is far more commonly used in the Animation industry when compared to Adobe Animate. AfterEffects allows you to develop Motion Graphics and CGI elements for videos, there are even 3D animation elements within AfterEffects.

Adobe Character Animator

Also included with an Adobe Subscription is Adobe Character Animator which allows you to use motion capture to animate your characters. With just a webcam you can act out the motion you want your character to perform and this software will make your character act out your motion.

You can get 40% off Adobe in February with this limited-time offer!

Autodesk Maya

Autodesk’s Maya is most commonly used within the 3D Animation circles, especially in industry. If you went to study 3D Animation the software they will be teaching you with will be Maya. I’ve only a limited experience with Maya so I can’t fully comment on the experience yet. 

Blender3D

Blender3D is another 3D Animation software that is open-source, meaning that it’s created by volunteers. Because it’s made in that way it’s free to download! But because of the open-source method of development, the interface is pretty difficult to use, even for experienced 3D Animators.

Conclusion

Learning Animation allows you to add another skill to your growing creative skillset. Being a multi-disciplined designer can allow you to expand your creative work and provide access to bigger and better opportunities. 

Every design field can utilize animation to create more engaging visuals that keep the viewer’s attention for longer and encourage engagement. Whether its animated simulations of stresses on components to creating an telling stories with dynamic visuals.

Animation is about manipulating time to convey something that you couldn’t with just static images or text. It adds another level of visual expression.

We hope to see more Animation in your work… It’s about time!

If you want to learn more about how you can expand your creativity and learn design’s transferable skills, sign up to the Nollie Newsletter. We’ll give you a monthly update of any new content and extra goodies!