From the course: InDesign: Creating Animations

Using buttons to trigger animations - InDesign Tutorial

From the course: InDesign: Creating Animations

Start my 1-month free trial

Using buttons to trigger animations

“

- Using buttons to play animation is a really effective way to add interactivity to your projects. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to set up buttons as start events or triggers for your animations. I'm not gonna cover creating buttons in detail. For that, there are a number of other courses in the Lynda.com library that you can check out, including We're gonna talk about buttons and animations. Let's take a look at this example. I'll play it in the Preview panel for you. On Page Load nothing happens. That's because everything is triggered by these buttons at the bottom. When I click on a button, these color bars animate. Like that. This gives you a much more interactive experience than if the bars just loaded On Page Load. Let me show you how this was set up. I'm gonna turn to the second page of this file where I don't have any animation applied, and we'll start with this group of red squares here. I'm gonna click on the first red square and apply the animation to it. In this case I want it to Appear. You can apply any animation and have it triggered by a button, but, we're going to use Appear. We want this to appear really quickly so I'm going to set it to the smallest duration, which is .125 seconds. I'm gonna remove the Opacity from it so that it will come in quickly, and I'm going to check Hide Until Animated so that my Appear will happen very quickly and distinctly. Now, we need to set the button as a trigger for this Appear event. The default event is On Page Load. I'm gonna turn that off. It doesn't turn off automatically. You're going to have to uncheck it. Now, I'll set the button as a trigger, and the way I do that is with this icon here. Create button trigger. I'm gonna click on that, and then click on the object that I want to be the button. When I do that a couple of things happen. One is InDesign automatically creates the button for me. Two, it adds the animation to the action on this button so there's really not much I have to do, except click on the correct object. Let's add these other bars as well. So if I want this second bar to appear, I want this one to appear first, then this one. I'll click on this bar, set it to Appear, reduce the Duration, set the Opacity, basically do all the settings that I want, and then again I want to uncheck On Page Load and click on the button icon again, and now I'm just gonna click back on this same button. It's already a button, but InDesign automatically adds that second animation for me. It's gonna sequence them for me. That's great, that makes it really easy. And in fact, we can select the rest of these red bars, as many objects as we like. We'll select them in the sequence we want them to animate, and we can set them all at the same time, and even set them all to have the same button as a trigger. So, I'm gonna set this to Appear, go through all our settings for these objects, and I'll remove the On Page Load trigger, and now I can click on this button and then click on the object I want to be the button. Look at that. All the animations are there in the exact order that I want. Let's test it. I'll open the Preview panel. There are no bars in this area, and if I click my button there they go. It's that simple. Now, let's take a look at the Timing panel. There's nothing there. That's because there are no On Page load events on this page. In order to see the Timing panel and see what the Timing is for objects tied to a button I have to click on a button. And here are my objects in sequence. While I'm here I'm actually gonna show you a little timing trick that will make these bars appear even more quickly. The minimum duration for Appear is .125 seconds. I'd like these to really come in immediately, one after the next, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select all of them in the Timing panel and link them. And then I'm gonna set a really short delay, shorter than we could normally have in just the Animation Panel. I'm gonna set them to .01, 1/100 of a second. I can do anything I would normally do in the Timing Panel as long as I have the button selected. And here the event says On Release. Let's check it out now. Now when I click that button, look how quickly those come in. So to complete this page, I would just go through and select each object that I want to animate, or even a group of objects that I want to animate, set them in the panel, change their Duration in this case, make all the settings that I want, and then the last step is to tie them to the button. Again, I'll click on the Create button trigger icon, and this time we want the teal button. The button is created, and the animation is sequenced in the order I selected it. That's important. If you want to control the order this goes in you want to select your objects in that order. And so this button should be hooked up. It doesn't have the super speed on it, but it basically works. So this is just one example, but I think you can see that buttons are really easy to set up as trigger events for animations or trigger events for even a sequence of animations. Using buttons to trigger animation action can be a really effective way to help your audience interact with your content or to even use in your own presentations.

Contents