Collaboration
Before embarking on this journey with us, keep this in mind; It's a lot of work, with 0% guarantee on revenue. It's in no way comparable to a commercial project. On average our collaborators make anywhere from €50 to €500 per typeface each quarter. It's a labour of love. You should only do it if you think it's a cool thing to work on. Approach it as a personal project and let any money be a nice surprise 4 times a year.
1. PROCESS
Concept
This is where it all starts. A concept. This typically is a small set of test renders showcasing a certain typeface with its animation principles. It should at least include 3 fully animated characters, and an initial design for a complete uppercase alphabet. One important thing to keep in mind is ... flow. All your animated glyphs are not individual animations, they're part of a modular system. They should work as building blocks in larger animations, being 'words' and 'sentences'. Our animated typefaces mostly animate in (and sometimes out). But just looping letters are an option too.
Production
When the concept is approved, we enter the production phase. Brace yourself for a long haul of tedious and monotone animation. Halfway through you will probably question all the decisions that led up to this. My only advice is to "keep on keeping on". You'll get there eventually! Just remember you love to work with type an animation, right? And you're totally free to spread the work out over a longer period of time. Doing a few glyphs whenever you're in between commercial projects.
Anyway these are the basic steps that we'll go through:
- Controller Setup.
Each animated typeface has a set of controllers to customize certain features of it. Sometimes it's only a color controller, in other cases it's a complex system of sliders, checkboxes and drop-downs. All hooked up with clever expressions. This is something we'll face together based on the concept. Don't worry if you have no experience with expressions. I picked up quite a few tricks along the way.
- Template.
I'll create this for you from the original font file. It's an .aep-file with all glyphs neatly organized in comps and folders. Each glyph has its own comp, and is positioned in exactly the right spot (please keep it there during animation!). These comps are labeled red for untouched, orange for in progress, green for complete, purple for special cases like weird bugs.
- Animation.
The real work. This is where you shine (or start to hate the world). You cycle through all glyphs doing your thing. Updating label colors as you go. Along the way I'll ask to peek inside the aep-file from time to time. Just to check if you're on the right way and catch any mistakes early on. There are some things to keep in mind when animating a typeface, which I explain a bit further on.
- Finalizing.
This is me doing a few extra steps to make your file ready for Font Manager. I'll add the kerning data and metrics from the original font. I'll batch rename all layers based on our naming structure. Remove any unused assets, and a few other things I won't bother you with. Finally I'll make it compatible with After Effects CS6.
- Testing.
A final test to see if all controllers work on all glyphs. This is me.
- JSX version.
Finally we can export to JSX format. Also me.
- JSX test.
Another test of all controllers to see if the JSX version exported correctly. And also me doing this final test.
- DONE!
(for this bit)
Promo materials
Now it’s up to you again to create promotional animations that showcases the typeface and its customization options. Typically this involves an overview of all characters, and some example uses.
It’s a good idea to use a consistent theme or style for this, but please keep in mind that viewer needs to be able to imagine your animated typeface into his own project. So please don’t go overboard by pushing your promo animation to far into a certain style or theme. Find the sweet spot! The deliverables are:
- Main promo for vimeo and product page. 1920x1080 in animation codec and a compressed version for Vimeo. Typically between 30 and 60 seconds in length. For music we can freeload on the collection of Sanctus or you can arrange something yourself.
- 3 or more 1080 x 1080 posts for Instagram. These are preferably looping, and/or grouped into carousel posts. The more the better.
- 3 or more 1080 x 1920 Instagram Story posts.
- 3 or more 1600 x 1200 loops for Dribbble. Please start the loop on the best frame. These are preferably GIF, otherwise mp4. We can also fall back to 800 x 600 if it's better for the file size.
- 1920 x 1080 stills for the product page. This should always include an overview of all characters and some examples of the typeface in use. Please make sure that images that go next to each other don’t have the same background color. The background color can also not be white.
Product Pages & Behance Project
Now that we finally have our product and all promo material, I'll create a product page on animography.net, aescripts.com and a project on behance.net. We're in business! Hooray! When you see your animated typeface being released to the public, your heart flows over with joy.
2. BUSINESS
Intellectual Property
You will always remain the owner of your work. Period. We do however require an exclusive right to distribute your work. We invest a lot of time your animated typeface and would hate to see it appear on some stock-site or template-market. This also keeps us in the lead of our niche. This does not go for any static versions. Those can be distributed on other platforms as well.
Finance
At the end of each quarter you will receive a royalty report with an overview your sales. All revenue is split 50/50 between Animography and the maker(s). For our 50% we will take care of parts of the production, hosting, promotion, admin, tech support and innovation. The remaining 50% goes to the maker(s). This may be one or multiple persons. If a typeface was created by more than one person, most likely a type designer and an animator, it’s up to those people to decide on a fair split if the revenue. This may be equal parts of 2 x 25% or something else depending on the workload. Both makers get their own royalty report with their personal percentage. If an animated typeface has a static version, the royalties of the static version most likely won’t be split with the animator.
We have an ongoing discount of 25% off on orders of 4 or more typefaces. This will be calculated in the royalties. We also have a reseller, aescripts.com. They charge a commission of 30% on all orders, and also have the same ongoing discount. This will all be calculated in your royalty report.
End User License Agreement
All customers agree to this end user license agreement during the checkout process. Feel free to dig through it for all the details. The most important bits are that users can use your animated typeface for personal and commercial projects of any scale. But it remains your work and they can not redistribute it in any way. Not online, not to their friends or their clients. If it is used in client work, they can only supply rendered work unless the client gets it’s own license.
3. ANIMATING THE ANIMOGRAPHY WAY
Animography has a specific approach to animation that you should be aware of. It mostly comes down to tidiness and precision. Maybe your used to keep your files a mess and pump out super clean renders. Nobody will ever see your layers, lack of naming, abandoned comps, etc. Well, that's not how we work. We try to be as tidy as we can to provide the end user with the best experience possible. Marie Kondo style. On top of that, our animated typefaces never depend on 3rd party plugins or external files. Here's the low-down:
Don't Mess Up The Typeface
The template file has each glyph in exactly the right spot. When the animation is complete, it should be in that exact spot. Otherwise the kerning will be mess-up up, or the glyph won't sit on the baseline correctly.
Often you'll need to cut the type up in pieces before animating. Please do this with Overlord and Illustrator. This will bring your shapes from Ae to Ai and back, so you can work with precision. Keep in mind that type designers often spend many painstaking hours getting their curves just right. We have to respect that in any way possible. No cutting corners here!
About Overlord, if you don't have a license yet, please get it through this affiliate link (Must have tool! Money well-spend). I have a custom version of this tool that I can share with you that is better suited to export compound shapes. Otherwise you might have trouble exporting letters with holes such A B D etc.
All Vector, Everything
Everything should be animated with vectors. Preferably with Shape Layers. This keeps it scalable without quality loss.
Composition Duration
All comps need to be 30 seconds in length at 25 fps. Make sure that frame 0 is completely empty and all required layers stay on until the end of the timeline. 25fps is our default, but the frame-rate may be different is there is a good reason.
Naming
We use a renaming script to rename all layers (except the controller and metrics) to A 01, A 02, A 03, etc. The naming inside shape layers should be in English. So if you use After Effects in Spanish, French or any other language you need to temporarily install the English version so the rest of the world can make sense of things.
Dead Weight
There should be none. Please get rid of all unnecessary layers, effects, markers, expressions, and items within shape layers. Not using only a stroke in a shape layer? Don’t just hide the fill, delete it! Have multiple shapes with the same fill color? Then use only 1 fill and the bottom of the stack.
Doing this obsessively will result in a super clean and lightweight file and a great user experience. Each tiny thing that we can optimize will result in a smoother file when you multiply it by 100 glyphs.
Character Set
The minimal character set is a full upper- and/or lowercase alphabet and numerals and basic punctuation. While this works in some cases like display typefaces, the ideal character set includes:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ÁÀÂÄÃÅÆÇÉÈÊËÍÌÎÏÑÓÒÔÖÕŒØÚÙÛÜß
áàâäãåæçéèêëíìîïñóòôöõœøúùûüÿ
1234567890
! ¡ ? ¿ . , : ; · " ' ‘ ’ ‚ “ ” „ # % @ & ( ) [ ] { } / \
* – + - × ÷ = < > _ ° $ ¥ € £ ¢ ™ © ®
But What If...
You have a really good idea, but there is no typeface yet? Something experimental, multi-color, that you want to design yourself? Let's talk. we'll find a way. We have many wonderful odd things in our collection. We also love to work with Fontself to create multi-color typefaces in Illustrator the easy way. Get 10% off with this link.
4. DOWNLOADS
branding package
example royalty report
end user license agreement