Disclaimer: I don’t advocate for adobe software and I’m not an affiliate of them too, it is just how I started.
I fast interacted with adobe software back when it was on CS5 not long ago but also long. I couldn’t resist it as they were known to have the best software. Before I decided to be a graphic designer and while still a student, there is this client who approached me with an awesome gig. (I knew little about adobe software). He wanted an association logo. All I could think was to create it in publisher as it was my favourite MS software for publishing and creating absolute and relative layers. So I accepted the job. On checking the client’s brief, I realized I was not ready for such a job. Not only did he want the logo designed, but he also wanted it to be animated. I never knew anything about animating logos. The pay was good and he believed in me. So what I did was to trust myself to learn faster. After all, people learn on the job.
I knew Google was my friend as people always say and we weren’t planning to become enemies anytime soon. So I google-searched how to animate a logo. I got searches and there is this that caught my eyes. Animating logos with after effects. I became curious about how this software works, so I checked tutorials (which made it more complex for me haha). I didn’t get any excitement. I found myself in tutorial flood, that made my learning much harder. I dropped everything and went to a tech meeting I had RSVP’d. The speaker was talking about how to learn faster. And there’s this point he gave out that if you are learning about software, there is no shortcut to learn. The only way is to use the software.
I reached out to a friend of mine who had all adobe software and installed all of them in my laptop, some I have not used till date. I told the client that I’ll be done in two days (this made me realize I work better under pressure). I had only one day to learn and design and animate the logo as a day had already gone because of the tutorial flood. This was a day I will never forget a story in my life. I used illustrator to design logo and bridged it to adobe after effects. There is this one tutorial by Avnish Parker was animating a Magento shiny logo. I think it’s about nine minutes long tutorial. I followed the steps involved and the rest was my creativity. I managed to work around with the tricks I got and my project was done within five hours in the work. This was the first real job that got me paid as a graphics designer.
