Boost your Animated Content Production with CHILI GraFx

In CHILIpulse Episode 3, we dive deeper into how Smart Templates work and how they bring huge productivity gains to graphic designers working with animated content. Keep reading for a summary of host Bram Verniest’s lively discussion with Serge Bonehill, Senior Product Advocate at CHILI publish. In this episode, you’ll learn the ins and outs of automating animation production with Smart Templates in GraFx Studio – our platform’s advanced template editor.

What is a Smart Template?

A Smart Template is a layout or design document with superpowers. GraFx Studio enables you to create or modify a template, then unleash the power of the CHILI GraFx engine to responsively shift and resize the design’s elements to meet new output specifications. It does all this while retaining brand guidelines and great design for consistent, high-quality content.

Thanks to the intelligence of CHILI GraFx’s Smart Templates, small tweaks to content can be performed at scale in just a few clicks, with multi-destination output rendered quickly. This makes changing a tagline or updating a logo a breeze and enables graphic designers to generate more personalized, high-quality video content in less time.

What CHILI GraFx Smart Templates mean for graphic designers

Animating digital content can be tedious for graphic designers, but animated content routinely performs well on social media platforms and other display formats. As such, GraFx Studio’s animated Smart Templates give graphic designers a much-need boost in quickly creating and outputting high-quality, brand compliant motion graphics content.

Thanks to the intelligence of CHILI GraFx’s Smart Templates, small tweaks to content can be performed at scale in just a few clicks, with multi-destination output rendered quickly.

So how do I create an animated Smart Template?

Smart Templates can be used to create static print and digital output in GraFx Publisher. But with GraFx Studio, exciting new possibilities for animated digital content creation also exist. Follow these steps to create an animated Smart Template for the web, social media or wherever you deploy your content.

1.Gather your assets

Before you begin creating an animation, you need to assemble the assets you plan on using to build your animated content.

GraFx Media is the CHILI GraFx platform’s media management app. It’s a central location where you can store and access the assets you want to use in GraFx Studio (and GraFx Publisher) projects. GraFx Media also lets you connect to external assets (think DAM systems), and, of course, working in GraFx Studio, you can also browse your local machine to locate files you want to use and ingest them into GraFx Media. All assets uploaded to GraFx Media will be available for other users to access in the same environment as you’re working in.

2.Design the template and add your animations

After you’ve gathered your assets, it’s time to design your Smart Template and begin animating.

Working in GraFx Studio is as simple and powerful as working in a desktop design tool. Getting started should feel very familiar: click on “Create New Template” and you’ll be greeted with a blank canvas to work in.

From there, you’ll start the creation process by adding two types of elements:

1. Static elements like the images and graphical elements that you’d like to include
2. Placeholders for elements like logos, text, and images that end users will be able to change in order to localize or personalize content.

With all the elements, dimensions, and layout in place, you can start to animate.

When animating, GraFx Studio’s timeline makes setting key moments in the animation a breeze. For example, in the video for this CHILIpulse episode, you can see how a bottle slides into frame based on its timeline position.

You can even add motion, pulsing effects, and a variety of other visual effects for emphasis at other places in the timeline. All of this is handled under the Intro, Emphasis, and Outro drop-down menus. Each element can be adjusted in this way to quickly create compelling motion graphics and animations.

And, as you work, it’s also good to know that all the elements on your canvas can be set to automatically resize and shift as needed to fit multiple output destinations.

3.Export your content

Once you’re happy with your design and animation, you can export it as an MP4 file or animated GIF for use in different output destinations. You can also export a single frame of your animation as a JPG or PNG if you want a static version that matches your animated content. And if you have multiple designs, sizes and variants to output, CHILI GraFx’s automation capabilities are fully accessible through the API, meaning you can scale your automatic output of animated content to any volume.

And that’s it! Getting started with animated content in GraFx Studio really is that simple and powerful.

Ready to learn more about animated Smart Templates? Watch CHILIpulse Episode 3 to see a full demo with Serge Bonehill.