Animate a web logo

Web logos have had a chequered history, from late 20th century Futura slabs with eclipses and lens flares to the current crop of Day-Glo ‘Web 2.0’ Photoshop madness. One thing certainly hasn’t changed: the rapid speed at which most of these effects are churned out. It’s shocking that the visual identity of a website is by and large given less thought simply ‘because it’s a website’.

Web logos can be the biggest, boldest and funkiest around. Take advantage of the technology available to you – make them move, make them funny but, most of all, make them memorable.

Flash made it possible for us to move away from static logos. We could make them move… and a thousand animated vector logos were born. The vector look didn’t last too long: Flash progressed and in its latest incarnation allowed us to add video to our websites. We can take advantage of all the depth, texture and animation possibilities industry-styled packages such as Cinema 4D, 3ds max and After Effects give us. The native Flash video encoder compresses video so our Hollywood style masterpieces can be added to our websites in their full glory courtesy of the native Flash video format – FLV.

That’s great for video, but in the following tutorial we’ll use it to create a 3D web logo with a short burst of animation. To do so, we’ll use some very simple Cinema 4D techniques and use the Flash encoder to add our mini marvel to a website.

The logo we’re making is for a fictional website called Love Bite. It’s the site to visit if you’ve ever had a bad date, sour Valentine’s day or just given up on love. The logo for the site is a small wind-up heart – the perfect symbol for a site you visit when your heart is well and truly wound up…

Click here to download the support files (13.9MB)