After Effects - Animated Infographic Video & Data Visualisation

Adding text & Adobe TypeKit in After Effects

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to look at Type. And then we'll look at bringing in new fonts from Typekit which is free as part of your Creative Cloud license. Let's go and do that now in After Effects.

So let's put in our text, grab the 'Type' tool, the capital 'T'. You can click and drag to get a box with boundaries. So it gets to the edge of the body text if you got a lot of text to go in. I'm going to actually-- see down here, this layer here, I'm going to click on it. Hit 'delete' on my keyboard. If I just click once, and you get a Type box that goes on forever. Mine is Aligned Center at the moment. So I'm going to go over here, we've got Character, and there's Paragraph. If you can't see either of these, they're under 'Window', and there's 'Character', and there's 'Paragraph'. You need both of them working with Type. I'm on 'Paragraph'. And I'm going to make mine 'Left Aligned' and I'm going to put in some 'Type'. 'The Value of Sleep for Creatives'. I'm going to put a 'return' in just to break this up a little bit. I'm going to 'select' it all, do some typey things. Mine's on 'Arial' at the moment, I'm going to make mine 'all caps'. And I'm going to go pick a 'font'. Under 'Character' here, we got all the fonts that are on your machine. So you can pick one of those obviously. But if you've got a Creative Cloud subscription you can go off to Typekit and get a whole bunch of new fonts. They're really good, and they're free. They're part of your paid subscription. So let's go check that out now.

This is Typekit, it might ask you to log in. That's me, Hi Daniel. What we can do is, go through, and just pick a font. There's lots of them, go through the 'Fonts' drop down. And you'll get lots of examples of stuff. Go through and just pick the one you want. Over here, are some helpful bits. Let's say I want stuff that's good for Headings. And it will sort it out from there. Let's say I want to turn that off. I want ones that are Serif fonts which means they got that little feet. I'll fold the edges. So you can go and hunt these down and switch on to handy fonts, it's hard to go and find.

There's lots of other things you can go and do in here as well. One of the things you might consider is the width. Sometimes it's nice to be working with a skinny font because, especially if you got lots of copy to go into Infographic, it's just easier, with lots of numbers to go into your graphs. It's easier to fit in skinny type. You'll fit a lot more digits in. Now the one I'm going to use for this class is Roboto. I'm going to bring in both Roboto and Roboto Slab. Click on one of them and then click this button over here, where it says 'Sync'. I've already synced mine, and that's it. Just click on 'Sync', I'll do it for Roboto and Roboto Slab. And they just appear in After Effects, you don't have to do anything.

Right, back over there. So with it selected, I'm going to go, you my friend, are going to be a Roboto. I'll use the Slab version for this. And there's some different widths but that's fine for me. I'll change my mind, don't like the Slab. And, still Bold, is it not the Black version? So back to this arrow here, 'Section' tool to move stuff around. I'm going to still use my Left Aligned, it could be centered, but we'll leave it there. What I might do is-- there'll be times in this course where you're like, "Can you just move on?" And this is one of those times when I start messing around with fonts for no reason other than my own pleasure.

So that is going to be it for Type and Typekit because it's not that hard. Let's go and start bringing in the icons that we'll use in our Infographic.