Mastering Adobe Animate 2023: A comprehensive guide to designing modern, animated, and interactive content using Animate

Key Features

• Produce rich motion graphics and interactive animations for multiple platforms by exploring the Adobe Animate ecosystem
• Get acquainted with the key features and enhancements in the latest Adobe Animate release such as depth, layering, and object warping
• Take your Adobe Animate projects to the next level with creative workflows using diverse animation techniques

Book Description

Adobe Animate is a platform-agnostic asset creation application that enables you to create motion design and vector animations while facilitating interactivity across other Adobe software such as After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator. This book comes packed with explanations of essential concepts and step-by-step walk-throughs of practical examples, guiding you in using Animate to create immersive experiences and breaking the walls of creative limitations.

In this third edition, you’ll begin by getting up to speed with the features of Adobe Animate. You'll learn how to set up Animate as a creative platform and explore the enhancements introduced in its most recent versions. The book will show you how to consume and produce media assets for different platforms through the publish and export workflows. You'll explore advanced rigging workflows and discover how to create more dynamic animations with complex depth and movement techniques. As the book demonstrates different ways of channeling your creativity through Animate, you'll be able to build projects such as games, virtual reality experiences, generative art, and apps for various platforms. Finally, this graphic design book covers the different methods used to extend the software to meet various user requirements.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to produce a variety of media assets, motion graphic designs, animated artifacts, and interactive content pieces for platforms such as HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, and mobile devices.

What you will learn

• Gain an understanding of Adobe Animate foundations and new features
• Understand how to publish and export rich media content to various platforms
• Find out how to use advanced layering and rigging techniques to create engaging motion content
• Explore how to create dynamic motions using variable layer depth techniques
• Develop web-based games, generative art, virtual reality experiences, and multiplatform mobile applications
• Make the most of Animate with extensions, application-level scripting, and the creation of custom-integrated tutorials

Who this book is for

This book is for web, graphic, and motion design professionals with basic experience in animation who want to take their existing skills to the next level. A clear understanding of fundamental animation concepts will help you to get the most out of this book and produce impressive results.

Table of Contents

1. Exploring Adobe Animate
2. Creating and Animating Shapes
3. Animating with Symbols, Classic Tweens, and Motion Tweens
4. Enhancing Animations Using Advanced Layers Mode
5. Setting Up Characters Using Layer Parenting
6. Physical Motion with Inverse Kinematics
7. Creating and Manipulating Warped Objects
8. Modern Rigging Techniques
9. Making Interactive Art with Creative Coding Techniques
10. Developing Web-Based Games
11. Producing Virtual Reality Content
12. Building Apps for Desktop and Mobile
13. Extending Adobe Animate

Joseph Labrecque is a creative developer, designer, and educator with nearly two decades of experience creating expressive web, desktop, and mobile solutions. He joined the University of Colorado Boulder College of Media, Communication, and Information as an instructor of technology for the Department of Advertising, Public Relations, and Media Design in Autumn 2019. His teaching focuses on creative software, digital workflows, user interaction, and design principles and concepts. Before joining the faculty at CU Boulder, he was associated with the University of Denver as adjunct faculty.