Animation for Graphic Designers: How to Animate a Logo

What it actually teaches

William Kesling structures this class around one live-fire example: a rebrand for Fathom, a financial reporting company whose mark is built from a Gantt-chart motif. Rather than treating animation as a bag of after-effects tricks, the course frames the whole project around a three-part storyboarding method. A "guiding object" (here, a simple circle chosen specifically to contrast with the logo's hard edges) leads into a "brand element" (a bar graph, since Fathom's business is financial charts), which then resolves into the final logo lockup. That circle-to-graph-to-logo structure is the backbone of every lesson that follows, and it is the one idea a designer could take away and reuse on a completely different brand.

The middle stretch of the course is a long, granular build. Kesling shows how to break a logo apart in Illustrator, layer by layer, labeling each piece before it ever touches After Effects, then walks through null objects and the Motion 2 plugin to group and animate multiple bars at once. He demonstrates parenting shapes to a null via the pick whip, adjusting rectangle paths instead of scaling bounding boxes (to avoid distorting stroke widths), and using the Graph Editor to add ease and momentum so the bar graph shoots upward with weight rather than moving linearly. Small tricks recur throughout, like using Command/Control plus arrow keys to jump between layers, or applying a Venetian Blinds effect and rotating it to add texture to a single bar.

Strengths and limits

The transition-building lessons are where the course earns its keep. Kesling shows two full transitions built and then refined in separate passes: first roughing in the motion, then returning to add visual weight, adjust timing in the Graph Editor, and tighten the overall duration toward a five-second bumper. That refine-after-rough-cut habit is a genuinely useful production discipline, and watching it applied twice, once building the graph, once collapsing it back into the mark, reinforces it as a repeatable step rather than a one-off tip.

The closing lesson on building a perfect loop is the most conceptually interesting part of the class. Kesling explains matching the ending frame precisely to the starting circle, using reverse time remapping and duplicated pre-comps so the same shapes that built the animation also unbuild it, and cutting a work area so the export only contains the loopable range. That is not a trivial technique, and it is not obvious to someone who has only animated linear sequences before.

The course's weakness is pacing for its stated audience. Skillshare bills it as accessible to any level, but the Illustrator and After Effects fundamentals get almost no explanation. Panel layouts, the difference between a null and a pre-comp, and basic path editing are assumed knowledge dressed up as beginner-friendly asides. A designer with no motion background will likely need to pause often to look up terms Kesling uses in passing, like round corners, time remapping, or the Graph Editor itself.

The export lesson is short but practical, covering the choice between an uncompressed ProRes 422 file for client handoff and a compressed H.264 for web delivery, a distinction many self-taught motion designers get wrong early on. Overall, this is less a beginner tutorial than a case study in professional workflow, best absorbed by someone who already knows their way around keyframes and wants to see how an agency-level designer actually structures a logo animation from brief to delivery.

What you will learn

• ·How to storyboard a logo animation around three components: a guiding object, a brand element, and the final lockup
• ·How to break a logo into individually labeled layers in Illustrator before bringing it into After Effects
• ·How to use null objects and the pick whip to control groups of shapes with one set of keyframes
• ·How to build and refine transitions using the Graph Editor, Easy Ease, and manual path adjustments on shape layers
• ·How to construct a seamless looping animation by matching the end state back to the starting frame
• ·How to export a finished animation as ProRes 422 for clients and H.264 for web delivery