Design | EasyDex GIF Banner

zord189 (72)in #art • 7 years ago (edited)

First Things First

It took me a while to finish this because I was also asked to create another design for a project on Steemit as well. I managed to get one Saturday to myself to finish up this banner. Though if given more time, I would tweak and would have made it better but I went straight ahead to make it simple yet impactful and straightforward.

So you pretty much see the whole logo and the word EasyDex on the GIF Banner with some flashy 'tron' style.

What is EasyDex?

EasyDex is a decentralized exchange site built on bitshares. It covers a variety of services and one of them is bridging fiat and crypto service. The fees are pretty low too. There are Steem/SBD to Fiat gateways available. Basically straight to your bank account. Just like how coinbase works.

To find out more:

Website : EasyDex Website

Steemit Handle : @easydex

But without further ado, let me share with you my GIF Banner for @easydex and my thought process behind it.

EasyDex GIF Banner

The Idea

The Idea behind it is pretty simple and straightforward. Flashy neon fluorescent outlining the EasyDex Logo and then the logo appearing at the end. I chose this 'tron style' of the neon lights was because if you've seen some of the EasyDex designs or thumbnails, or maybe just head to their website and you'll see network grids everywhere throughout the webspage. And somehow they love purple and pink. So what better colour to highlight the signature colour that @easydex carries by turning them into bright neon fluorescent outlines.

The whole GIf Banner is only around 7 seconds. A GIF banner shouldn't be long and too much detailed. It should however, lead people to click on it or to catch a glance of it.

Scene 1

Well, first, I imported the logo of Easydex and added the text in. Tweak its colours to a bright pink with slight purple outline. So it will look as though the middle is glowing to the outside. When i'm satisfied with this, I head on to create the neons strokes by using an effect called vegas.

Scene 2

I started off we creating strokes/outline of the logo first. And then I animate the strokes like it's playing snakes around the logo and text. Here is the settings I used.

With Strokes set to 'image contours', it will follow the outline of whatever image you put in. Pretty neat. I also made the strokes separated into two segments. That means it starts from two points rather that having one stroke running all around the logo in such short time. To create the electric vibe, you can actually add more segments if you want.

Scene 3

Once I'm happy with how the stroke animation plays out, I went on to tweak the effects of the stroke by adding 'adjustment layers'. Each adjustment layers for a specific effect on the stroke. I added a 'glow effect' and bumped it up pretty high. Added two types of blur effect, 'gaussian blur' and a 'fast blur' for movements. Lastly, I added a 'curves' layer to add colour to the strokes.

Scene 4

Lastly, I used the 'exposure' effect and masking to create a 'fade in' transition of the logo as the logo slowly reveal itself.

Final

Tada!! This is the FINAL output of the Easydex GIF Banner that I've created. If I had more time on my hands, I would tweak a few things more because this was not that satisfying for me but given the time, I managed to get this out and looking alright.

Well, I hope you enjoy looking at the 'behind-the-scenes' of how I create my GIF banners. My apologies if some part of this post was a tad bit technical.

I remember going to a workshop for 'Big Hero 6' the movie and I saw some pretty technical stuff that the artist accomplished. After that workshop, I went home to watch 'Big Hero 6' again, and it totally gave me a new perspective on things. I appreciate the small details more, even that scene that appears less than a second took some tedious planning to get right. Oh gosh, I'm bantering to myself right now... anyways, thanks again for reading!