Learn how to animate website elements effectively, using tools such as digital publishing and layer panels to create an interactive page. This article guides you through the process of grouping objects, creating buttons, and animating text and backgrounds.
Key Insights
- The article instructs on setting up an interactive page, beginning by changing the workspace to digital publishing, and grouping the text and background for the button together as one element.
- An important part of the process is creating actions for the text, using the rectangle behind and layers panel to animate the description background and text, making them fly in from different directions.
- Another key insight is the addition of a button event, making the animation occur on click rather than on page load. Furthermore, the article demonstrates adding a feature to hide the button once it's clicked, providing a cleaner, more interactive experience for the viewer.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we'll be animating the different elements of this page. So let's begin first by changing our workspace from VDCI, and we'll go down to Digital Publishing.
In order for this page to respond correctly, we need to have this element right here—our photo details and background—correlate with the text and the background for our details. So to do this, let's first group our text and the background for our button together as one element. To do this, we'll select our text first, and right-clicking, let's select Next Object Below.
Then, holding Shift, we'll also select our text on top. We'll then right-click and group these objects together by selecting Group. From here, we can now create this as a button.
We'll go to Buttons and Forms and select Button under Type. While this is now a button, we need to create some actions for our text. So to do this, let's first select our rectangle behind, and we can go into our Layers panel and drag this out so it floats on our left.
If we select our description background here, clicking on the right-hand side, we can go to Animation, and we're going to decide that it's going to fly in from the bottom. We can see a preview of this here. Next, let's have our text fly in from the left. So selecting our description, we'll go back to Animation, and for our preset, we're going to have it fly in from the left.
In addition, we want this event to happen not on our page load, but we'd like it to happen on a button event. Currently, we can't select On Button Event, but if we go to our actual button here and click on Photo Details, we can go to Buttons and Forms. Within our Buttons and Forms, let's now go down to our Event, and we want these things to happen On Click. We'll go to our Actions and select Animation, and here we have our description background animation happening on our button click.
Let's change the title of this to Photo Details and hit ENTER. The second animation we want to happen is not just the description background—we would also like the animation of our description of photo. To see all of this together, let's go down to our Preview, and once it loads, we can hit Play. When we click Photo Details, we'll see this animation happen.
However, if we clear the preview and hit Play again, we'll see that the text and the background come up already from the beginning rather than just when Photo Details is clicked. Therefore, let's go back to our text and observe our animation. Here, within Events, we have On Page Load and On Click. Let's uncheck On Page Load, and we'll do the same thing by selecting our description background since we only want it to happen On Click.
We'll uncheck On Page Load and preview this. We'll clear the preview and hit Play, and here's what will show up for our viewer. Once we click Photo Details, we'll see that our text and our box come up. As another change, once this text comes up, we no longer need our Photo Details button.
So why don't we remove this from view once it's clicked? To do this, we can add another change. We'll select our button and go to Buttons and Forms. Let's add
One more action. We hit the plus sign, go to Show/Hide Buttons and Forms, and from here we can see the visibility. Photo Details is our button here—we want to hide that when we click the button. We'll drop down and select Hide. From here, we'll preview this again and hit Play. When we click Photo Details, we see that our button disappears and our text comes up. However, once the text comes up, if we want to read the description as a viewer and then close this description box, we don't currently have a way to do so. Let's add an "X" on the top-right hand of this rectangle so that we can close out our description box.
To do this, we'll close our EPUB Interactivity and create an "X" using lines. We'll use our Line Tool. So let's simply draw a line across, holding Shift. With this selected, let's right-click and select Copy, and right-click again and select Paste in Place. We can then rotate this top line, holding Shift, until we have two lines forming an X. From here, let's select both lines, and we're going to increase the size of the line. Let's make it white by selecting White as our stroke. In addition, let's also group it by right-clicking and selecting Group so we don't select different line segments. Finally, let's shrink it down to a more appropriate size, holding Shift. From here, we're going to move it into the top-right corner of our rectangle. If we zoom in here, this still feels a little bit large, so let's change the size first down to two points, and let's just decrease the size—holding Shift and dragging in. In addition, 1.5 for our font may be a more appropriate size. We'll hit ENTER. This looks pretty good for now. Let's save our work by hitting CTRL + S on the keyboard to save, and in the next video, we'll assign that X to serve the purpose of removing the text and background.
See you there!