InStep: Tumbling Tricks

Create a cascade of animated… anything.

Recently, I wrote a few articles here at InDesignSecrets on how to make holiday-themed graphic effects. One of the effects was falling snow, which I created with InDesign’s animation tools and then posted to Adobe Publish Online.

You can view the falling snow animation here. In it, snowflakes of different sizes slowly drop around the title “Happy Holidays,” curving and turning as they go to create a glimmering winter wonderland.

This is a cool effect, but what’s even cooler is how you can easily adapt it to create all kinds of other fun and festive looks for different holidays, seasons, and special occasions.

For example, you can create some gently falling leaves to enhance a project in autumn.

Or try a blustery day effect with some umbrellas floating on the wind.

Or drop a bunch of celebratory balloons any time you want to mark a birthday, anniversary, or achievement.

There are endless variations and themes you can play with, and they all start with the steps I’ll show you in this article.

Start by choosing the theme of your project, and decide what kind of graphics you want to use to illustrate that theme. In this example, I’ll use a theme of “celebration” and illustrate it with balloons.

You can use native InDesign objects, but you’ll have

more flexibility if you use placed graphics. Why? Because once you’re finished creating the effect, it’s easy to switch from falling balloons to falling leaves, snowflakes, or anything else just by relinking to a different set of image files.

In this case, I used a piece of stock art as a starting point. It contains a bunch of colorful balloons in vector format.

In order to animate the balloons individually, I needed to separate them into different files. So I opened the file in Illustrator and copied a balloon of each color that I wanted (blue, green, pink, purple, and yellow) into separate Illustrator files.

Place the graphics into your InDesign document. In my example, I created a new document using the Digital Publishing Intent with an iPad page size. Then I placed each of my Illustrator balloon graphics, and positioned them on the pasteboard above the page.

I wanted a static element for the balloons to fall past, so I added a text frame with the word Celebrate in a festive script typeface called Savoye.

To create a random cascading effect, it’s necessary to vary the starting positions of the graphics. All you have to do is move them with the Selection tool.

Using the Pen tool, draw a curved path from one of the graphics to the pasteboard below the page.

Then select the path and the graphic and, in the Animation panel, click the Convert to Motion Path button.

Repeat this process to add custom animations to all the graphics, using paths that curve in different ways.

Vary the Duration value to make the graphics move at different speeds, and make sure all the animations are set to Loop.

Create as many copies of the graphics as you like by selecting each one and Option/Alt-dragging them to other positions above the page.

Add some variety to the graphics by rotating them and resizing them.

Add more variation to the animations. Use the Direct Selection tool to reshape some of the motion paths, and set varying Rotation values in the Animation panel. Use the EPUB Interactivity Preview panel (Window > Interactive > EPUB Interactivity Preview) to see the results and guide you in making further tweaks.

Use Object > Arrange > Send to Back (or Bring to Front) to make graphics move in front of or behind the type as desired.

In the Timing panel, select all the animations, and click the Play Together button so they all play at the same time. Also confirm that the Event is set to On Page Load for all animations.

Export your document to Fixed-Layout EPUB or Publish Online. And remember, to create a new variation (like to change those falling balloons into falling leaves), just use the Links panel to relink to a new set of graphics. It’s as easy as falling down!