Your logo is what represents your business, what it does and what it stands for. This is why designing a logo for your company or brand is so important because it is the first thing that clients and partners see when they come across your business. You want your logo to be professional, unique and for it to convey your brand’s values and mission. But having a good logo for your business is not enough if it’s not presented in the right way, you will want to make your audience familiar with it by adding it to your marketing materials and overall business presentations. You will want to make your logo your whole brand’s personality.
Why Do I Need a Logo Animation For My Business?
Making a logo animation is a great way to make your logo evolve into the more dynamic forms of communication that surround us, like video content. Here are some of the best use cases for your animated logo:
✓ Intro/Outro for YouTube videos. Build brand recognition by initiating or finishing your tutorial, corporate or marketing videos with none other than your logo in an animated format. You can make a logo intro, logo bumper, end card videos and more featuring your brand’s logo!
Bold Intro Maker with Intense Text Animations
✓ Business presentations. Let’s say you are presenting a new project to the board, you will want to finish it with an animated logo that will make it come across as sharp and professional.
✓ Pitch videos. Looking for investors or partners? Making pitch videos can be a hassle, close them with a striking logo animation to really convey seriousness and make them want to do business with your brand.
✓ Social Media Content. Your social profiles are the best places to build brand recognition. Use them to showcase your logo animation and get your followers familiar with it. Sites like Instagram are all about media content, use your animated logo as an outro for your videos – or even photo carousels to grab the attention of new audiences. Promo ads are great but showing your promos, sales, new season collections using animated video are more engaging than static images.
✓ Your Website. Replace your static logo with a logo animation to increase brand awareness. Just check out how amazing a business logo looks like when animated!
How Do I Make an Animated Logo?
Want to make an animated logo to use for the applications mentioned above? There are several paths you can go by. In this post, I will go over three different options so you can choose the one that best adjusts best to your budget, calendar, and design expertise.
Option #1 – Hire a Designer
One of the easiest ways to make a logo animation is to hire a designer or animator to do this, if your company has an art or design department you can simply commission this to them, if not you can always search online for a freelance designer who will take care of this task for you.
Sites like Fiverr or Upwork allow you to hire a qualified designer to animate your brand’s logo into a clip you can add to your YouTube video, presentations of social media content.
Here’s what you can do to make an animated logo with an outsourced designer.
Step #1 Visit a Freelance Design Site
NOTE: I chose Fiverr since I’ve worked with designers from this place in the past and I’ve had good results.
Step #2 Type “Logo Animation” on The Search Bar
You will get a screen like the one below with different results from lots of artists and designers, browse through them to see their work and select one whose style matches what you are looking to create for your business (and your budget!).
TIP: Below the search bar you will see some related search terms, you can use those to browse other types of services that can be more specific to what you need.
Step #3 Choose a Designer
Each designer will have a different work method and schedule, make sure you read the reviews before hiring someone.
For example, this designer seems like a good fit for what I’m looking for based on the demo videos he shows. Also, there are some great reviews on the gig page and his profile has a 5 star review average, have a look:
Another thing you can take into account is the number of orders in the queue as this can say a lot about the designer, his demand, availability and overall professionalism.
IMPORTANT WARNING
Be careful when hiring people on Fiverr, keep in mind the Internet is a huge place that holds all sorts of people with all sorts of intentions, there have been cases of people purchasing logo designs from freelancers on Fiverr only to later find out that these have been previously registered. I suggest you read the reviews of each designer before hiring them or using the designs they deliver for your own business to make sure you are acquiring an original logo design or animation.
Option #2 – Animate Your Own Logo in After Effects
If you don’t have the budget to hire a designer and you’re feeling a bit experimental you might want to try creating and animating your logo on your own. Like many DIY paths, this may seem like the cheapest way to go, but don’t let yourself be fooled, using complex editing software like After Effects is no easy or cheap endeavor.
Here’s what you will need to make an animated logo on After Effects:
✓ Your logo. The required format is PNG with a transparent background.
✓ Adobe After Effects. The monthly subscription just for this program is $19.99, and $49.99 for the whole Adobe Creative Cloud. You can download Adobe After Effects here and get 1-month free trial.
✓ Editing and animation skills. Think Photoshop is complicated? Wait until you open up AE, this is a program that can be used to create amazing animations and graphics, but if you are not familiar with the tools and the commands it can be overwhelming.
Here’s a really good tutorial from the Adobe team on how to use After Effects to make basic animations of your logo; you might want to check it out as it covers the entire process.
Option #3 – Use Placeit’s Logo Animation Templates
One of Placeit’s goals is to make beautiful design templates and marketing assets available to everyone, regardless of their design skills or knowledge. Making a logo animation to display your logo in an innovative way is now super easy thanks to Placeit’s animated logo templates.
Step #1 Choose a Logo Animation Template
Visit Placeit > Video Maker > Logo Animations
Step #2 Upload Your Image to The Video
Drag and drop your logo to the “upload box” or select the file from your computer.
Step#3 Customize Your Logo Animation
On some templates, you can add music, change animations, add pictures or videos, change colors and more! Click preview to see for yourself how awesome your logo looks when animated.
Step #3 Download Your Video
These logo animation videos are 100% free on a small size, that is 640 x 360px with a Placeit watermark, these can come in really handy if you are looking to make a preview for the team before committing to download the real deal. The high-res video is 1920 x 1080px and it only costs $9.95!
I used to make Lego stop motion videos on my phone when I was young and I sure did enjoy it!
Adobe After Effects is just overkill to be honest; you should only be using After Effects for video editing, not for logo animations, unless you plan to use logos specifically for videos (like for video intros). In the web design department, the way most web designers create SVG animations is by using Adobe Illustrator (to design the logo) plus CSS (to add in animations). When you save a logo as an SVG file, it really is just an XML file, and so CSS has strong compatibility with that format; you might have to add in an id or a class field to parts of the SVG file to really explore the animation customization.
But if you aren’t into adding code to create animations, there are also other animation tools you can use like SVGator. I seriously recommend using an SVG format, because other formats tend to have their own drawbacks (e.g. video formats like MP4 aren’t compatible on most browsers and often require some video player, image formats like GIF are bitmap only so you might not have a crisp-looking animation, and so on).