Motion Graphics: Animated Stickers & GIFs for Social Media

Explore Illustrator tools for designing animated stickers, including the shape tool basics, rectangles and ellipses, color fills, Pathfinder union, Shape Builder, pen tool, and layer alignment.

Illustrate a love sticker in Illustrator by creating a 500 by 500 GIF-ready document, forming letters on separate layers with pathfinder and shape builder, then color and save.

Create a panda sticker in a 500 by 500 document using vector shapes and shape builder, with layered elements for animating the head, eyes, nose, and mouth.

Illustrate the cat sticker by building shapes on separate layers and using the ellipse and the pen tool. Apply a color palette and outlines for animation readiness in After Effects.

Create a work sticker by using a 500 by 500 canvas, a color palette, and geometric shapes, then add a centered typo and an animated line.

Learn to illustrate a bomb sticker in Illustrator by tracing with the pen tool, using geometric shapes, layers, Pathfinder, and color palettes for a clean, editable design.

Illustrate a popcorn sticker by designing a blue pot, duplicating rectangles into two color columns, and layering shadows and gradients for depth on a 500 by 500 document.

Explore After Effects tools to import assets, create compositions, and set names, resolution, background, and frame, then animate with keyframes and easy ease for smooth looping stickers.

Master simple After Effects expressions—random, wiggle, and loop out—apply them to opacity, rotation, and position to create dynamic, looping animations without manual keyframing.

Import illustration files into After Effects, switch to composition with retained layer size, set 500 by 500, and access all layers in the timeline by opening the composition.

Animate stickers in After Effects by converting vector layers to shapes and extruding for 3D depth. Use easy ease and velocity to create looping keyframes, export PNG with background hidden.

Animate the panda sticker by converting vector layers to shapes, applying perpetual rotation via a time expression, and driving mouth and 3D type movements with smooth ease.

Animate a cat sticker in After Effects by drawing a tail with the pen tool, shaping it with points, and keyframing with easing; then animate text with wiggly scale warp.

Animate the wok sticker by revealing a line with opacity, then loop the motion via a precomp and a wiggle expression, tweaking frequency and amplitude for energy.

Animate the bomb sticker by converting layers to shapes, creating a precomp, and rotating the top with adjusted anchor point; apply keyframes and a ping pong loop expression for texture.

Master popcorn sticker animation in After Effects by building a precomposition, using a random expression for pops, and tweaking Y position, rotation, and scale with Gradient Remap and color variation.

Export sticker animations from after effects by adding to render queue, selecting lossless QuickTime with rgb and alpha channels, enabling audio output, and naming the output path for each sticker.

Export stickers as gifs for the web using Photoshop's save for web legacy. Set gif format, adjust color depth to 16 or 256 at 500 by 500, and enable looping.

Create animated stickers by building a single 1920x1080 blue landscape composition and animating elements side by side to showcase your work on social media; upload to Giphy.