SITE DESIGN TIPS

Today I’m going to show you an easy and effective way of animating a panel to create an attention grabbing effect.

1. First, create a new canvas, 300 x 300 pixels with a white background.

2.SITE DESIGN TIPS

Today I’m going to show you an easy and effective way of animating a panel to create an attention grabbing effect.

1. First, create a new canvas, 300 x 300 pixels with a white background.

2. Using the Elliptical Marquee tool set the constraints of the selection to a height of 100 pixels and a width of 100 pixels.

3. Create a new layer and fill the selection with a shade of blue as shown below…

4. Now we want to create a 3-dimensional sphere. This can be done by using LIGHTING EFFECTS. Select the “FILTER > RENDER > LIGHTING EFFECTS” menu command. In the LIGHT TYPE option select OMNI and position the omni light as shown below with the corresponding settings.

5. Create a new layer below the existing layer which has the sphere by pressing “CTRL and the create new layer button” located in the layer panel.

6. Using the Rounded Rectangle tool create a rectangle with a radius of 60 pixels as shown below.

7. Select the “LAYER > LAYER STYLE > GRADIENT OVERLAY” menu command. Set the gradient as shown below and set the ANGLE of the gradient to 180 degrees.

8. Make two duplicate copies of that layer by selecting the “LAYER > DUPLICATE LAYER” menu command. Move the first duplicate layer slightly to the left of the original layer. Do the same for the second duplicate layer as shown below. Delete any reminence of the rounded rectangle if it appears on the other side.

*TIP* To create a more realistic effect I changed the gradient of each layer slightly so that there is a slight black tone where the sphere and rectangle meet.

9. Save each frame as a different gif file remembering to switch off the layers with are not needed. Each of the images below represent a different GIF file.

FIGURE 1.0FIGURE 2.0FIGURE 3.0FIGURE 4.0

Import these files into GIF ANIMATOR. Have the first frame as Figure 1.0 followed by fig 2, 3 and 4. Set the time delay for figure 1, 2 and 3 as 15 1/100th of a second and the last frame fig 4 as 200 1.100/th of a second.

10. Optimize and save the animation and there you have it, an easy and effective panel animation.

With a bit of extra practice, you can create something like this: