How to make a changing spinning icon gif in Photoshop for your elearning
In a previous blog we covered how to create spinning gifs in Photoshop for one icon, but it is also possible for your image to change colour, or even to a wholly different graphic when it turns to the other side. You can even do this more than once! This is great for looping between two or more graphics in the same space in your elearning.
You might want to refer to the previous article on this – How to make a spinning icon gif in Photoshop for your elearning – so you will already have the photoshop file of an existing spinning icon. Now, the icon doesn’t have to be the same every time.
So for this trick, create a new layer and add a new smart object. Drag the layer object after the first rotation in the timeline, and create keyframes for the new graphic, making a second rotation.
The difference with this animation is that you have to create frames at the halfway points between the main transformation frames and scale the image to be almost completely flat, and that the animation should start and end with one of the flattened keyframes to make the looping smooth between the two graphics. The effect is that the graphic will change to a different one after one and a half rotations.
Don’t forget to check your work by clicking the Play icon in the top left of the timeline frame to see if there are any jumps in the animation. If there are any, you might need to see if you didn’t match up the keyframes correctly.
If you want to keep the changes coming, you can add more layers and more animation blocks for each new graphic you want to add to the timeline!
Check out any of our other tutorials on Photoshop or Illustrator for great ideas on how to add exciting graphics to make your elearning more engaging and effective, or contact us to discuss how we can help you do that!
