Since we will be working with text in this tutorial, let's start by switching to the Text workspace. Go to the upper right corner of the Composition panel, and just above it, you'll see this double arrow here. Click on that and that'll show you all the rest of the workspaces. Let's choose the Text workspace. That'll open the Character panel and the Paragraph panel here on the right side of the interface. Let's start in the Character panel and set our font. So, click on the first drop-down and you'll notice that we have not only the names of the fonts on the left, but previews of what the fonts will look like on the right. I want to choose Arial for my font. So, I'll start typing arial. And now I have a bunch of different Arial options. So, I'm going to choose Arial Regular. To set the color of our text, let's go over the right side here and notice we have red as the previous color. Yours may be a completely different color. In order to choose white, just click the white box down here. Just so we all have the same size text, let's click on the drop down where we can set our text size. I'm going to choose 60 px. Lastly, go to the Paragraph panel and make sure that the text is center justified because we want the text to be centered underneath of our main text here in the Composition panel. As I'm looking at the Composition panel, its magnification is less than 100%, and I'd like to actually zoom in. So, I'll go to the lower left corner, click on the Magnification drop down and change that to 100%. Now, to add text into the scene, let's go to the Tool panel in the upper left corner and click on the T for the text, and then we'll hover underneath the word LANEKA'S and then click towards the middle here. And let's add the words custom, clothes, and then press Return to go to the next line. And we'll add the line since 1965. In order to set this text, let's go back up to our Tool panel, and click on the leftmost tool, our Selection tool. To reposition the text within the composition, simply click inside the bounding box and start moving the text around. If you hold Control on Windows or Command on the Mac, after you start dragging, you'll notice the text will start to snap to different objects in the scene. Now, I'm going to let go of my mouse and the Control key, because I'm going to move my mouse right over the center section of the words here. That way when I click and drag, and then start to hold Control on Windows or Command on the Mac, that signifies that I want to snap the center of these words to the center of the different objects in the scene. So, notice when it looks like this, then you can go ahead and let go with your mouse, and let go of the Control key. Let's make our text all caps. Go to the bottom of the Character panel and you'll see a graphic representation of all caps here with these double Ts. Go ahead and click on that button and that'll make the text all caps. To customize the different lines of type within one single text layer, go down to the Timeline and double click on the T icon, just to the left of the name of the layer. Once we double click, we'll see the text is now highlighted in the Composition panel. And when I hover my mouse over the words I get the I bar, which means I can edit that area of the text. I'm going to start off the right side of 1965, click once and drag to the left to highlight the entire lower line. Go ahead and let go of your mouse once that's highlighted and then we can go back to the Character panel and anything that I change will only change the selected text. So, I'm going to change this text from 60 px to 40px. If you press Tab, you can move to the next field. The next field here controls the amount of space in between the two lines. This is called letting. I'll click on that drop down and choose a setting of 72 px. That's going to give me a lot more space between the different elements. Let's hover back over our text again so we get the I bar, and start on the right side for CLOTHES and click and drag to highlight back to the left. With the top line selected, let's make this line of type a little smaller. Go to the Character panel again and don't use the drop-down. Just click directly on the pixel value 60 px. Then use your up or down arrows to move the pixel size up or down. This is a great way to make fine adjustments to your type layout. Once you get a size you like, grab the Selection tool to set your type layer, and let's go down to the Timeline and look at our text layer. If we open the options for Layer 1, you'll notice text layers have options in addition to the normal Transform options you'd get with any layer. And it's also important to understand that text layers aren't footage elements here in your project. They're actually generated from within the After Effects CC project itself. And they reside within compositions.

In After Effects CC, there are several pre-built Text Animation Presets ready to go to help speed up your daily Motion Graphics CC workflow. There are multiple ways to browse and apply Text Animation Presets. I recommend having Adobe Bridge CC installed on your system, so you can see a graphic preview of the animation before you apply it. If you don't have Bridge CC, you can use the Creative Cloud desktop application to install. However, Adobe Bridge CC is not a requirement as there are other ways to easily apply Text Animation Presets, as we'll see shortly. Look in the Timeline of your project and you'll notice we have three text layers. For now, let's focus on the top two layers for animation. Let's zoom in on those two lines of type by holding down the Z key and moving our mouse over the Composition panel. When you do that, you should notice your mouse is turned into a magnifying glass. Click and drag a box starting in the upper left and go to the lower right, right around these layers. And then let go of your mouse, and then let go of the Z key. Dependent upon how close you drew that box will determine just how far you've zoomed in. You can use the Comma key and the Period key to zoom in and out. Just make note of the magnification down here in the lower left corner of the Composition panel. Go to the Timeline and select Layer 1. To browse the Presets, I'll go up under the Animation menu and choose Browse Presets... Give your computer some time to launch Bridge CC and then you'll see a group of folders. Go to the lower right corner of Bridge CC and drag on the Magnification slider to zoom in on the folders. Then let's navigate to the Text folder and double click to look inside. To browse the Presets where the text animates into the scene, let's open the Animate In folder by double clicking on it. Click once on the Fade Up Characters.ffx preset and you'll see a preview of the animation load up here on the right. Let's double click on the preset and notice we're back in After Effects CC and the preset has been applied directly where the Current Time Indicator is in the Timeline. Since it was at frame 0;00;00;00, that's where the preset will start. I'll press the Spacebar on my keyboard to watch a preview. And if you look in the upper right corner, you can see it's not quite playing back in real time. So, that's fine. I'll wait until it gets through the Timeline once and caches all the frames. Then when it plays back, it'll play back in real time. If you want to change the timing of this animation, simply select the layer and then press the U key to open the animated properties. I'm going to press the Spacebar to stop playback. And you'll notice we have two keyframes here to create the animation. Let's make this shorter by clicking on the right keyframe and dragging it to the left in the Timeline. Keep a close eye on Info panel in the upper right corner of the interface to see exactly where you're dropping that keyframe. I'll have this animate over the first second. So, I'll stop it right when it gets to 0;00;01;00. To move my Current Time Indicator back to this keyframe, I'm going to press the J key on my keyboard. If your Current Time Indicator was on the other side of the keyframe, you want to press K to move to the keyframe. J and K will move you up and down the Timeline, between all the visible keyframes. To animate the next text elements, go ahead and select Layer 2 in the Timeline. This time instead of browsing Presets to apply them, I can actually go to the Effects & Presets panel over here. Notice they're Animation Presets right here on this side. To make this panel large, I'll double click right on the words Effects & Presets. Now I can open up my Animation Presets and in here I'll go to the Text area, and then under text, I'll go to Animate In. This time instead of fading up characters, I want to Fade Up Words. So I'll double-click on that effect. Let's double click on the Effects & Presets panel and see if our effect has been applied. Notice, I can't see my type anymore. And if I select Layer 2 and press the U key, there are my keyframes. So, now, if I move my Current Time Indicator to the beginning of the Timeline, now we can see our entire animation. Applying and working with Text Animation Presets is actually a great way to learn a little more about what's possible in After Effects CC. If you're not happy with the timing of a Preset, remember you can always open the Timeline and slide keyframes around to make adjustments.

After Effects CC has a toolset specifically designed to animate text letter-by-letter. In fact, the Animate menu is embedded in every single text layer and it's only one click away. Let's look at our project. Go to the Timeline and click once to make sure it's active, then press the Spacebar to load up a preview. And you'll notice the very first layer just cuts into the scene. I'm going to press the Spacebar to stop playback and I'll select Layer 2, which is that very first text layer, and I'll press I to move to the endpoint of that layer. Let's open up the options for Layer 2 by clicking on the Triangle on the left side. Now, instead of opening the Text options, let's go over to the right where it says Animate and click the button to the right of Animate. I want to animate the Opacity of each one of these letters. So, I'll go up and choose Opacity out of the group. Now notice I have many more options that have appeared here underneath my text. We're going to focus on this one here called the Animator. Animator 1 specifically. Animators are usually comprised of two components. You have the Range Selector and then whatever parameter you just applied. The Range Selector is a method for selecting individual letters for animation. We'll see how to select those letters in a moment. But what's important to understand is whatever is within the range takes on the value of whatever property you just added. So, what I'm going to do, since I want this to fade in, is change the Opacity to a setting of 0 %. Now, let's open the Range Selector 1 in the Timeline. And one of the things I like to tell people is if you're not sure what a parameter does, go ahead and scrub on it, so you can get a preview. So, let's move our mouse over the Start parameter and click and drag to scrub. And notice as I scrub to the right, this line here is moving to the right. This line here is called the Start. And this is the Start of whatever letters are going to be selected. So, if we go down here and scrub on the End parameter, notice we have a similar line going the opposite direction. You can also click on these selectors directly in the Composition panel. If you hover over one of the selectors, click and drag, notice as I'm dragging, the parameters are changing down here in the Timeline. Usually with my projects, I have a lot of layers, so it's a little hard to be clicking in the Composition panel all the time. So, I recommend scrubbing here in the Range Selector 1. So, I'll change my End setting to a value of 100%. And I'll change my Start to a setting of 0%. So, to create the animation, I'll go ahead and add the keyframe here right at the Start. And I know it's at the Start, because we pressed I to move to the endpoint of that layer. Now, I like the speed to happen over the next second. So, I'll just go here in the upper left corner of the Timeline, and I'll type 200 and press Enter, and that moves us to two seconds exactly in the Timeline. And let's change this Start parameter from 0% to 100% and press Enter. Now we're ready to preview the animation. Move the Current Time Indicator back to the beginning of the Timeline and press the Spacebar to preview. Now we've successfully created a fade over each individual letter using a Text Animator. And there are many different options available inside of Text Animators, so I highly encourage you to keep practicing and play around with the different settings. After all, they say practice makes perfect.

 

Incorporating type with graphics is one of the hallmarks of a typical Motion Graphics project. In this tutorial, we're going to use a shape layer to help better define the visual hierarchy in the composition. And make the text pop off the background. Our text here is over top of a really busy background. And if we go to the bottom of the Timeline, and enable the Visibility of Layer 4, you can see I have a beautiful color for the background, but since it's the same color as the leaves, on the top and bottom, I definitely need to add something in between this logo and this hollow solid. And to do that, I'm going to add a shape layer. So, the first you want to do when you're trying to create a shape layer in a composition, is make sure there are no layers selected in the Timeline. Then you can go up to the Tool panel, and click and hold on one of the Shape tools. Since I had the Rectangle tool active last, that's the tool that was up. But if you'd been using a different tool, you may have a different tool active here. Make sure the Rectangle tool is the one that's chosen, and then come over to the right side here. Whenever you have a shape layer selected, you can adjust its Fill and Stroke options up here. I like how those are set up, so, let's get started creating our first shape layer. Position your mouse over the left side, kind of in the middle of the Composition panel, and click and drag down to the right. Hold Shift after you start dragging and that will keep the square in proportion. Once you've drawn something similar to this, you can go ahead and let go of your mouse, and let go of Shift. Now, we can look at the shape layer in the Timeline. Shape layers have their own icon, and they also have contents. And this content was Rectangle 1 because that was the tool I had chosen to use. If we open the options for Rectangle 1, notice, Rectangle 1 has its own Transform options. So, let's open up those Transform options, and under the Rotation parameter, let's go ahead and scrub the rate most position parameter. Notice, this rotation for Rectangle 1 is rotating around the center of the shape itself. I'll press Control + Z on Windows, or Command + Z on the Mac, to undo that last rotation. And let's collapse the Transform for Rectangle 1. Open the Transform option for the layer, and then click and drag on the rotation, and you notice now, the shape is actually rotating around the center of the composition. So, again, I'll press Control + Z on Windows, or Command + Z to undo that last setting. To position the rectangle in the middle of the Composition panel, open the Transform options for Rectangle 1. And change the position to 0.0 on the X, and then press Tab to move to the Y, and let's change that to 0.0 as well, and we can press Enter to set. Now, let's make this rotate on a 45-degree angle. So, go down to the Rotation setting, and change that to 45.0, and press Enter. Now, you may notice that we need to make the shape larger. So, all we have to do is just click and drag to the right, on the Scale parameter. And since this shape layer is a vector element, I can scale it up well over a 100%, and it will still remain intact sharp. Once you've scaled up the square to be a size that you like, scroll up in the Timeline and let's collapse the shape layer and position it vertically in the layer hierarchy. So, let's drag it between Layers 3 and 4, and then, go enable Visibility for Layer 5. So, we can look at our shape layer. And it's definitely helped our logo pop off the background. So, having multiple Transform properties available using shape layers, gives you access to an extra hierarchy of Transform properties. This does come in handy when it comes time to create complex animation.