I’ve already shared why Motion Design Doesn’t Have to be Hard, but I wanted to make it even easier for designers to use the Material motion principles I know and love. After Effects is the primary tool our team uses to create motion examples for the Material guidelines. Having used it to animate my fair share of UIs, I wanted to share my workflow tips and…

My After Effects sticker sheet

Download this basic sticker sheet to see a project completed using my streamlined workflow (outlined below). It contains a collection of Material components, baseline UIs, and navigation transitions.

Download it here 👈

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Importing assets into AE

First things first, we need assets to animate. Most of the visual designers on our team use Sketch, which by default doesn’t interface with AE. Thankfully Adam Plouff has created this plugin that adds this functionality. I used it to import our library of baseline Material components from Sketch into AE. These assets are found in the sticker sheet’s Components folder.

Creating UIs

With this library of baseline components, new UIs can quickly be assembled by dragging them into a new AE comp.