How To Create Interactive Button Triggered Animations In InDesign CC

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at one of the features for Publish Online and EPUB where we click on a button, get ready, steady, and the address slides down. So Button Controlled Animations, let's look at how to do that now in Adobe InDesign.

So one of the really nice features of Publish Online is kind of interactive buttons. This particular technique will work for EPUB as well, once we get on to that. What I want to do is make that interactive map like we saw at the beginning. So what we'll do is, on our Pages panel, I'll go to my last page, double click it. Click on 'New page', you get a blank page. It's going to say, "Hey, we're messing around with pages". We had some transitions, don't worry about it because we're not using as Page Transitions because they only work in interactive PDF, in full screen.

So I'm going to go and turn those off in a minute anyway. So page 7, I want my 'W' key to make it look nice, zoom out a little bit. Let's bring in a couple of graphics. I'm going to bring in my-- it's in '04 Interactive', there's one called 'Map1 World'. Click once, so I got a nice big map. Let's bring in the icon as well, so 'Map2 icon'. Click once, and we've got the map for US. I'm going to copy and paste it. Turn it around for the UK, paste it again. And one for New Zealand. Those are the different addresses for Maynooth Furnitures. So let's get the address. It's in the 'Exercise Files' called 'Map3 Addresses'. And just grab the 'UK Store' to start with, I'm going to copy that. And here in InDesign, I'm going to do a little bit of a rectangle. Click the pink. Grab the Type tool, I'm going to hit 'W' so I can see my background. Draw the type out here, paste it in. I want to make it 'Paper'. And I might lower the font size a little, actually just grab my Black Arrow and just move it into place mode, adjust it over here. Maybe it's the right size already. Here it is, I like it that size.

First of all we need this thing to animate and I'm going to get it to end up about there. So you can see, mine's kind of right there, 'W' key. Somewhere right there. I'm going to have to group these together because I want them to animate together. So I'm going to go 'Command G', or 'Control G' on a PC. Let's first do our animation, let's go to 'Animation'. Let's give it a name. I left these other ones called Group. That was called Group, Group… that's not very well named. Makes it a little bit hard to animate later on. I'm going to call this one 'UK Address'. The preset that I'd like to give it, is I'd like it to fly in from the top. Let's just have a little preview in EPUB Interactivity. Hit 'Play', wait a second. You can see there, just kind of fades down.

Now we need to get it to be triggered by the button because at the moment it's getting loaded during the page load. So the page comes up in the screen, and then it slides down. I'm going to stop that, and get the button to control it. It's pretty easy, click on the icon that I want to turn into a button. Let's go to 'Buttons', and let's click on 'Type', and it should be a 'Button'. I'll give my button a name, I'm going to call this 'Button UK'. And under here where it says 'Actions' I would like this option here that says 'Animation'. That says 'SWF/EPUB only', but it works perfect in Publish Online. Let's click 'Animation'.

Which animation do I want it to play? I want it to play the UK Address. These other three groups are from these guys that I didn't name; Tables, Chairs, and Shelves. Remember, the slow, sliding in. So I want it to play animation called UK Address. So it's going to kind of work because if I go down to EPUB Interactivity, and hit 'Play', it slides down, but if I hit 'Button' it works, but it's also playing when the page loads. So I'm going to turn that off. I'm going to click on him. Go to 'Animation'. There's an option down here, it says, actually, Animation, it says Events. At the moment it's got two. On page load, which it can load by default, and now there's one called 'On Release'. So when I release that button, it plays. So I'm just going to drop that down, and say actually I want the Button, but I don't want the Page Load.

Now, if I go down to my EPUB Interactivity, hit 'Play' ready… doesn’t appear until I click this button. Awesome, huh. I like you to go through and practice doing the US. So make a little box, put some Type in it, put the Address, Type in it, group it, animate it any way you like, then create the button to get it to load and then turn off the 'On Page Load'. That could be the worst example of go off and do it. I guess what I want you to do is just do that again, see if you can do it for the US one. You can replay the video, it's totally up to you, but have a practice on these other two using different bits of animation.

One of the other things you might do, this button, it's being triggered - where's my buttons? - is been triggered, something called 'On Release'. It just means it's being clicked, so when it gets clicked, when the mouse is released, or tapped on the screen, only then it's going to work. You could have 'On Roll Over'. That's quite a common one to have as well. So that when I click here, hit 'Play', I'm not going to click it with my mouse, I'm just going to roll my mouse over. And then it starts doing it. Now I totally lied, it does work when you go to Publish Online or EPUB, but it doesn't work in this little EPUB Interactivity. It totally works when it goes out but when it's in this tiny little preview window it's not quite working properly but it totally does, trust me, when you roll over it.

So we've done it with just some text popping in. You could have like another navigation down the side here to pick images and the images could slide in, do it for images. So you might have to think outside of the box to work out how you might make this work for you in terms of communicating information on one page. So let's go and look at some of the other features we can do with Publish Online.