Setting up an animation workspace

- Before you start working with InDesign's animation features, you may want to set up an animation workspace. There are certain panels that you're going to need to access frequently, so you want to have them readily available. In the center of the screen, you'll see a screenshot of the final workspace, which you'll find in the exercise files. I'm now in the process of finishing up my animation workspace here. I like to start with the interactive for pdf workspace. I've moved and added some of the panels, here. I've also removed some panels and I've got one more to remove.

I'm not going to use the gradient panel very often, so I'll click on it to open it, grab it by its name, and then close that panel. You'll see that I've grouped together several of the interactive panels, here, buttons and forms, media, and object states. Now we'll open the panels that we're going to be using the most. From the window menu, I'll go to interactive and open the animation panel. When you open the animation panel, it's important to open this little properties area.

We're going to be using that a lot. Now, I'll position this panel to the left of these other panels by moving it over to the right until I see a blue line that runs vertically next to the other panels. When I release the mouse, the animation panel is sitting there, including the properties area. The other panel that we're going to use a lot is the timing panel. That's also under interactive on the window menu and I'll choose timing. I'm going to grab this panel and tuck it right underneath the animation panel.

We'll be using both of these panels quite a bit. Finally, there's one more panel that I like to have access to and that is our preview panel. From the window menu back to interactive and I'm going to choose the epub interactivity preview panel. I like to make this panel quite large. For this course, I'm going to make it even larger than usual so that you can see what's going on, here. This panel I'll grab by the name, here, and then I'm going to tuck it right underneath the object states, here, so that it's in this right most column of panels.

Finally, I'm going to collapse these right panels, here, by dragging the mover to the right so that I have a little bit more screen real estate. Now I'm ready to save this workspace. I'll go to the workspace menu, choose new workspace, and let's call this animations. I'll click okay and now we're good to go. I can switch back to this workspace anytime I needed. For example, if we go to the interactive for pdf workspace and reset it, it looks like this, but then I can easily change back to my animations workspace.

If I open a panel and pull it over to work on it, let's say the layers panel, which we'll also be using a lot, if I just want to clean things up so that I can see my page again, I can just come to the workspace menu and choose reset animations. Very handy. The most important thing about your workspace, however you set it up is that you have the animation panel with the properties section open and your timing panel and layers panel should also be really easy to reach. You'll be using them a lot and having your workspace ready will help you save a lot of time.