How to create morphing animations ✨

👋 Welcome to the latest edition of my monthly motion design newsletter, where I bring you fresh tutorials, a sneak peak of what’s coming soon, a handy tip, and a random recommendation!

🥳 New

I partnered with the lovely team at Astute Graphics to create a 5 video series covering how I illustrated a set of plant graphics.

To be totally transparent, I had never used Astute Graphics illustrator plugins before they reached out, but I found that their tools solved a lot of frustrations I have with Illustrator (like adjusting multiple bezier handles at once). I now find myself turning to these tools consistently in my workflow. You can get a 7-day free trial here.

Check out the video series

I also published a bonus tutorial on how to create this morphing animation between the plant graphics in After Effects.

You don’t need any plugins for this tutorial, and you can use the techniques with your own graphics, or download my plant illustrations to follow along.

Check out the tutorial

🤫 Sneak Peak

I’ve been working on an explainer video for my Explanimated channel, and plan to show some behind-the-scenes content and “how I made this” tutorials from that video on Animation Explained (and in this newsletter).

🔎 I’m also still working on that new handy tool for After Effects that I mentioned last month.

As always, the 📥 suggestion box is open if you have any tutorial requests!

⚡ Quick Tip

If you need to find the length of a line (this works for curved line and lines with multiple points!), in Adobe Illustrator here’s how:

Open the Document Info panel by going to Window > Document Info
In the 3 line menu, choose Objects
Click on your path with the Selection tool and the length will appear in the Document Info panel

I recently needed this to create an accurate infographic-type visual for the explainer video I’m working on. Hope this is helpful for you too!

👉 Random Recommendation

I recently picked up the book Beautiful News by David McCandless at my local library. As I mentioned, I’m working on a new explainer video and wanted some inspiration for the data visualizations I’m including in the video. Not only is this book visually stunning, but it also contains uplifting data about the numerous improvements humanity has achieved. No affiliation, just found it worth sharing!