There were a few things I wanted to tackle in the down (jobless) time of the COVID shelter in place order. One of them was animation. Despite my proximity to the world of design/animation, I had never dedicated any serious time to learning either. I’ve always (luckily) been on a team of creatives that had excellent designers who understood more about animation than I did.

I decided to make my quest practical and asked one of my coaches at my CrossFit gym for the Illustrator files of our gym’s logo. I was also very unfamiliar with Illustrator. My first attempt, I didn’t know how to resize in Illustrator and did a really wonky of job of transferring the .ai project into After Effects. After doing all of the animation very manually (because of my unfamiliarity with the program), I shared this first attempt with animator friends for feedback and advice.

Thankfully, my friends sent me to some very helpful tutorials on Illustrator to AE workflow which led me down of a path of learning about…”Trim Paths” in After Effects which made everything so much better. AE is a beast of a program. I know I’ve barely scratched the surface in learning what it can do. Despite the simplicity of the animation below, I’m proud that it’s practical and made the owners of my gym happy to use it.