Animation in Photoshop
Using Photoshop to create a custom Slack emoji
We’re starting a module on animation in our Special Topics design class, and I’m super excited. I’ve wanted to learn about animation for a while now, and had just experimented with After Effects for a campaign video for another class. In our first class we learned how to make a basic gif in Photoshop of a box moving back and forth.
After learning the basics, our assignment for the first week was to create a custom gif in Photoshop and upload it as a custom emoji in Slack for our channel. Our module teacher, Emily, asked us what types of emojis we felt were missing from our Slack channel. We agreed as a group that there were not nearly enough happy hour-related emojis, considering how often we do group happy hours each week. With this in mind, I sketched out a few ideas for the possible gif.
Our group frequents the local Mexican restaurants in Boulder, and we love a good marg. A few ideas I had were to have a lime dripping juice, a lime spinning to the side of a margarita glass, and a chip scooping guac. The idea I decided to go with was a bottle of tequila with the cork popping out and spinning away.
I started out with a Patron bottle image, because I feel like it’s the most recognizable tequila bottle shape. I created a vector by tracing the bottle, and then added a lime to make it more recognizable. I then made the cork as a separate file, because that would be the part that was animated. I tried to choose colors that were representative of tequila.
After finishing the two vector files, I created a new Photoshop file and imported the files. The animation portion of this was a little tedious. I had to slowly move the cork in each frame, but do it only so much that the animation still looked fluid and not too blocky. I put the cork in the top of the bottle, and slowly removed it and had it spin off the screen. Some of the challenges I ran into while doing this were I had to speed the frames up more than I expected. After the initial image of the cork in the bottle, each “removal” image was only one frame long.
After finishing the gif in Photoshop, I exported it to web, and then opened up Slack and followed the guide. This is the result I ended up with:
I think the animation is pretty fluid for my first go at it. However, it’s so small when it appears in Slack and it’s hard to tell what it is. I may go back and try and create something that appears to work better at such a small size. But for now, I feel like I’ve learned a lot about creating basic animations in Photoshop.
