CC Libraries are amazing in After Effects - start using them now

Hello, beautiful people. In this video we are going to look at CC Libraries and why they're awesome for your Infographic and Data Visualization work. You can seem them over here. We're going to bring in colors, and icons, and all sorts of cool stuff. We're going to work a little bit with Illustrator. Let's go and check out the awesomeness now in this video.

First things first, we're going to open up the file I've got the icons in. I am not in After Effects, or anything, just in the Finder in Mac. So if you're on a Windows PC just go to your Desktop and try find the exercise files. Open up '01 Icon Pop'. Open up '01 icons.ai', an Adobe Illustrator file. Now when it comes to Illustrator and After Effects they just can't live without each other. Illustrator is designed to make icons, and graphics, and illustrations, and After Effects can do it kind of badly. So even though you might not have any Illustrator skills it's not going to be that hard for what we need to use it for.

So these are icons that somebody else has made. Check out one of my Illustrator courses if you want to get into this in more detail. But what we're going to do is under-- we're going to reset our 'Workspace' just to make sure it's like yours. So I'm getting started, 'Reset Essentials'. Now, first thing we want to do is, we're going to look at something called Libraries. So you might be using the Adobe Creative Cloud now but ignoring these libraries. They keep popping up, and you're like, 'Ugh, go away." This is the video that's going to convince you they're super awesome, and you start using them, especially with After Effects.

So first thing we're going to do is, you'd probably go to 'My Library', and like me, it's probably filled with junk or empty, if you're not using it. So we're going to go down to 'CSS', 'My Library'. If you can't see Libraries, go to 'Window', here he is there, 'Libraries'. And click 'My Library', go down, 'Create New Library'. And this one here is going to be 'Infographic Animation Course BYOL'. And what I'll do is, I'll add a link to the screen right here. This link, that link there. That will link you to this Library. Click on the link, it will take you through you'll have to sign up with your Adobe password. And magically, you'll have this exact same one we're creating here. If you don't want to do that, don't worry, don't have to. We'll create our own as we go along.

So we've created our New Library. It says 'Drag and Drop Assets', it's easy. So what we're going to do is, I say, you, so I've selected it all, I'll grab my Black Arrow, I've selected a box around it all. Grab them all, just dump it in there. I'm going to double click the word 'Artwork1' and this is going to be 'Icon1 - House'. I never name them, I just leave them the way they come through as, but we're going to be super official here. I want you to do what I say, but not as I do type thing. So we're going to drag these along. I'm going to speed this up, or at least Tayla or Jason. So, ready, steady, go. That's the reason I don't rename them, takes forever. But I’m going to share this with you, so I want to make it look nice.

So why is this so good? You're like, "Awesome, you've chucked them into that box there." What's really cool is, we jump to After Effects now, hold on. And in here, there's Libraries. And the cool thing about Libraries is in here, there's my Infographic one that I've made. And these are all my icons, I can start dragging them out. You still might not be super impressed. What you can do though is you can right click it, and say I want to edit it. Opens it up back in Illustrator. It's not the same thing, it's like a copy of that original one. But I can go into here, and I can say actually, this thing here, if you know Illustrator you can start editing things. I'm not sure what I'm doing, I'm wrecking it. If I hit 'Save', up there, he's there, and I go over here, a lot better there, I wrecked it. So I'm going to go back into here, I'm going to undo all that wrecking. Hit 'Save' again, close it down.

You'll notice that it's here, it's fine. So it's connected between all these products so it's great for things like logos for your business. I've got ones in here for lots of different projects and companies because it saves me having to go off and find them on my hard drive. Now what I'm going to do for this course to make life a little easier with Libraries is that they're kind of tied in with all these panels that I use quite a bit. Now what I've got actually is another screen, it's just over here. You can't see it but there's a big screen next to this screen. And I often will put these panels over there. And what you can do is, let's say, the Library grab the word 'Library', click, hold, and drag it. You can go away, and drag over to this panel here. You can't see it here, but that's where I've stuck it. But what I'm going to do is, so you can keep seeing what I'm doing, is I'm dragging it. You can see all these weird things, that means, it's going to go above, below, next to it. I want it next to it, this bit here. So I'm going to have these guys so when we get to 'Character', 'Panel', 'Paragraphs', and over here, under 'My Libraries', it's a bit small. Drag it out. Here we go there, so I can see my stuff. And I want to make it just a little wider.

So, CC Libraries are awesome for some like that's pretty cool, the other nice thing is that Premiere, the exact same Library appears. Photoshop. So you're kind of connecting them all together. Doesn't have to be icons, you can drag stuff from Photoshop, you can drag videos in here, you can drag any sort of thing. By any sort of thing, let's go check out what else we can drag. Let's jump back into Illustrator.

So here in Illustrator, I'm going to grab my White Arrow. I'm going to click on this kind of circle on the outside. You can see, that's the Fill color. I would like that to be part of this Library. And you can do it by clicking this '+' button down the bottom. By default, you've probably got all of these selected. It will bring in the graphic, which is my icon. The Fill and Stroke color. I don't need the Stroke color because it's white. And I don't need the Graphic, because I already got it. I'm going to click it. It's just the color swatches. It's a perfect swatch to match that. If you've got your brand colors for your company you can go and do that. I'm going to go through and add all these colors. These are the colors I'm going to use for my project. We're not going to now, but you can add things like Paragraph Styles, and bunches of text Character Styles, all sorts of awesome things end up in Libraries.

One more thing before we go is that if you're using Libraries, and you are in a company, you're like "Oh, it's really awesome, imagine if I can share it with someone." Up under 'Libraries' here, there's little swipy lines here, the hamburger menu. Click on that, and go to 'Collaborate'. Collaborate and Share Links, they kind of sound the same. Collaborate would mean I can share it with my colleague next to me. So Malcolm's there, and I say, collaborate with him. And he can add, remove, delete, and edit. So I trust him, he knows what he's doing. I wouldn't though. Malcolm is an amazing developer, but not with my library. But anyway, let's say I just need to share. I'm like, "Malcolm's going to ruin this" I need to just share a link, that means, he can get it, he can see it, but can't mess with it. So it's up to you how you want to do it. That link I had earlier in this, is the one I went 'Share Link'. And I went and turned it on to be Public. You can click on that, and work through it, it's not hard to do. So now back over to After Effects. Now why do we come back over here? I'm not sure. We're done with this video, let's move on to the next one.