From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 14 Shape Layers

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Tips for stylized bars

Tips for stylized bars - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Apprentice: 14 Shape Layers

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Tips for stylized bars

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I want to take a couple of minutes to share with you one of my favorite techniques, combining shape layers with Photoshop-type layer styles to create some more interesting looks for your graphical elements, particularly buttons for user interface design or lower third bars. Now this is just a various simple rectangular shapes. I will twirl open a shape group. You will see we do indeed have a gradient fill. If I want this to be the full width of this composition, I just need to drag out its width and drag out the user interface elements for this gradient fill. I am going to hold down Shift to make sure they stay horizontal. There we go. And drag this out to full width. Now one of the first things I tend to do with the gradient fills in other bars is have them dissolve off the ends. This is particularly a good design trick when you have to design something that works in widescreen and 4x3. People justify the text inside of 4x3 but still need to have a bar that looks good across a whole…

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