After Effects is the main animation tool used nowadays for a variety of things: from UI mockup animations you see on Dribbble to movie animations, 3D character animations, movie and TV visual effects, gaming and web, this tool is very versatile and has lots of options for the user to create amazing things.
The software uses vector shapes, images and videos, works very nicely with 2D environments and has the ability to manipulate 3D objects as well. Using this tool, you have the option to create presentation videos with the ability to add sound. Because After Effects is part of the Adobe tools, you can easily incorporate entire Photoshop or Illustrator files as separate compositions and animate their elements.
If you wish to automate some actions, you can write scripts or use extensions. In addition to these, there are also plenty of plugins out there (simple scripts) to help speed up work. Some of the most popular plugins are Optical Flare, Plexus, Trapcode serie, Newton 3, Saber, Boris Fx, etc. Many of these plugins come with predefined effects to make your life easier.
Just like Photoshop, Sketch and others, After Effects is a tool that will help you solve a problem, which in this case is about telling a story. All stories have an intro, the anticipation of the tense moments, action and the end. Before jumping into After Effects to do the animation, it is good to put your plan on paper and sketch it first. Just like there are core principals in design, animation has some too. You can read more about the twelve principles of animation introduced by Disney here. They help make an animation more nice and realistic.
Although it might sound like a complex tool it’s actually easy to pick up the basics.
After Effects animation is based on layers and keyframes. A layer can contain one or more objects and you can animate its properties such as position, scale, rotation or opacity mask, or you can use any effects from the library. A keyframe is a point in your timeline for which you specify a value. The animation is created between two keyframes with different values, which is set up using a stopwatch. In order to control the flow of the animation better, you can employ the Graph Editor to use different interpolations for the animated curves using easing.
To export your animation to a movie, you would have to add it to render from File > Export > Add to Render Queue.
In the 2D industry, web and mobile application design, many animations are used for showing cool application animations.
Sorce Dribbble: Daniel Tan
With the rise of augmented reality, motion tools have a word to say in the design of that area too:
Sorce Dribbble: Cosmin Capitanu
One of the best applications in 2D design is logo animations. Many big brand companies have great animations for their logos: