Hi everyone, we're going to make this kind of... animated gradient goodness in the background here... we'll also tie in together our technique... where we're going to be using variables and animating those... rather than just doing a whole bunch of frames on our Artboard... because you end up with things like this where there's just like a zillion...

a zillion connected frames, and they're fine, but they can get real messy... we're going to tuck them in nicely, so on our canvas we've just got one frame... inside of that is a component, hiding all our animation, using variables... all right, let's go and make it. For those of you want to just jump to using variants instead of frames... I've kind of skipped ahead a little bit, and I'll show you it quickly...

and then if you want to, after I've shown you... I will go through and build this thing from scratch... and add some tips and tricks as I go along... but for those who just want to know, basically, what we want to do is... I've created a frame, separate from my main phone just because... I need a bit of working space, and I want to keep it separate...

instead of duplicating the frames and connecting them using the Prototype mode... what I'm going to do is, select my frame, I'm going to give it a better name... I'm going to turn it into a component... 'Command Option K, 'Ctrl Alt K' on PC... and I'm going to create a variant of it, I'm going to have two of them... and that's what I want to do, I'm going to move between these two...

connect them up with prototyping, the same as I do with frames... but they're going to be a component with variants... that means we can stash them away and hide them... so let's quickly do it. I'm just going to go in this one here and change it a bit... I'm not going to do much, I'll do more in a second when I go through it fully...

you... we'll do speed mode. All right, something different about the two... I'm going to go 'Shift E' to switch to Prototype mode... I'm going to select this, and say, you, my friend... are going to connect to here using...

the animate, 'After Delay'... a delay of, I'm just going to use '1' millisecond... and I'm going to say I want to change it to 'Smart Animate'... I'm going to 'Ease In and Out'... and it's going to take five seconds, which is '5000' milliseconds... when it's finished it's going to go back to that top one, you, back up there...

there we go, it needs to be switched back to, after delay of '1' millisecond... but all the rest should be okay. Now that we've made it... I can go to my Assets panel, remember, 'Option 2'... and I'm going to say, you, go inside here... get it lined up, so that animation is baked into this component...

that I can now go and preview... and look at that, movie gradient goodness. So if you just wanted to do that... you just want to figure out this kind of different way of animating... rather than having that big massive... document of connected frames, that's how you do it...

hey, team, before we carry on, just a little update... Figma has launched a new preview option... throughout this course there was only one... so we'll just use the 'Present', and Present, open it up in a new tab... to preview our sweet new animation. What we can do now though is you can actually do this other option in here...

which says 'Preview', instead of Present... Preview will open it up in a little kind of like tab within the application... so you can view it... the cool thing about it is that you can have it there, and--  I'm going to grab my 'Frame' tool... and let's add something to it... you can see kind of live updates...

so depending on the screen size you could have this kind of like... tucked in the corner, kind of always previewing... showing your animations and all your changes. So it's cool, it's new, the only trouble with it is previewing desktop... you can kind of make it happen but it really wants to... at the moment this might change, check it...

really wants to preview phone apps or mobile websites... my desktop version gets a bit squished in there, that might work for you... you can open it up in another tab and that's kind of what I'm still doing... I might get used to this new way... but for the moment, and the rest of the course at least... I'm going to have it in a separate tab...

and often I like it, because this goes into another document... or another screen at least, I've got another screen... that I've connected to my computer... and I have it over here always previewing. This one here, this guy here doesn't leave the screen... or at least he doesn't at the moment, I can't drag it to this other screen...

it's kind of stuck within this window... so up to you which one you want to use... there is a shortcut for both of those one, 'Shift space' is the new one... or 'Option Command Shift space', that's the same on Mac or PC  or present the original way, which is 'Option Command Enter' on a Mac... and that is, what is that? 'Alt Ctrl Enter' on PC, there you go.

All right, continue on with the course, update over... I'm going to backtrack now and show you... how to do this kind of cool gradient stuff... and there's some tips and tricks... and some things that might catch you out, let's go do that now. So I've just made an Artboard, I've called it Welcome Alt 1...

and what I like to do is, with the F tool I'm going to make a frame over here... so just type the 'F' key... I like to do it separately from this main one... just so that it's a kind of a separate unit... it's bigger than what I need, I got a bit more room to design in... because it gets cropped down later on, I'm going to name it...

and we might run into trouble with drawing the blobs... is grab the 'P' key for the Pencil tool, sorry, Pen tool... watch this, if I draw, first of all, if I start over here... what ends up happening is I get a shape that is-- let's give it a Fill... it's not actually in my animation... can you see here, it's above it, and I need to drag it in there...

so that's one thing that might happen... the other one is-- I'm going to undo... start drawing, the least amount of points, you have the nicer this thing looks... so four is good, three is fine, ten little anchor points is bad... and to get a smooth corner I'm just clicking and dragging... clicking and dragging gives you nice smooth points...

but the first and last anchor point that joins them all up... ends up being a point for some reason... you can hold down your 'Command' key on a Mac, 'Ctrl' key on a PC... and click, hold, and drag to kind of smooth that out. I'm going to give it a Fill and a Stroke... and I mean, no Stroke...

and this is where it ends up, you know, you can make it look quite vector-ey... or quite gradient mesh like... by changing this from Solid to 'Radial', and then playing around with colors. It kind of looks, doesn't look great now, but once you overlap a couple of these... it starts looking really cool, so I'm going to go from my primary color... to just a faded version, I'm using radial for this case, you can drag this around.

The next thing that might catch you out... is you're going to start drawing your next shape now... and if I start drawing it now... because it looks like it's finished that other shape, right... but now what ended up happening... my second shape was actually smooshed into my first vector...

which can-- just makes it hard to animate... so what you need to remember, or forget, and then undo, like I did... is when you get to your finished point click 'Done', hit 'Enter', or hit 'Esc'... kind of commits that vector... and then back to the P tool, or Pen tool... and start drawing your next shape...

then, can you see over here, it becomes a second vector... and again, I'm going to hold down my 'Command'/'Ctrl' key... and fill it with a--  doesn't have to be radial, it can be linear. I'm going to click on this first color here, and I'm going to say... you are that purple-ey color... in color, even though the opacity is down...

it still has a color, so I can see it, the dark color... but I want the opacity down... I'm not... and I'm going to draw a third shape, you wait there... and there you go, I didn't hit 'OK'... so ended up being smushed into that vector, like I said, don't do...

"Good work, Dan"... so, undo... and hit 'Done', and then do it again, you wait there. So what shape should you draw? Anything works, sometimes they come out great... and sometimes they come out horrible...

but just play around with drawing shapes... I'm going to put a Background Fill on mine as well... slightly darker color to kind of fill it up... you can kind of see, we're starting to get those shapes going... it's hard to know where to like begin... let's just start doing it and see how bad it is.

The other thing I'd like to do is add a bit of blur... so I'm going to go 'Effects', 'Drop Shadow', to 'Layer Blur'... click on the sun, I'm going to say, going to click, hold, and drag on the blur... up to something... close that down, I'm going to copy it... I'm going to try and click that magic area in there, hit 'Copy'...

and then select these other two shapes, and hit 'Paste'... let's see what we can do... make sure he's back in there... remember, when you're dragging - undo. - hold down 'Shift' while you drag, spacebar, sorry... it means it won't jump outside the frame...

I don't know, "Just start making, Dan," "Okay."  So we've got our first one, got some blurs... let's do what we did before... so we went, you are going to be a component... 'Command Option K', 'Ctrl Alt K' on a PC, let's have two variants... the variant ends up down the bottom, which is annoying... just kind of guesses where it should go...

what I'm going to do is, I want it to go up here... but I don't want it to jump out... of my component set, I want to say-- hold 'space bar'... so I start dragging, hold 'space bar'... and then go over here, you're like, "Excellent."  I can't see it... grab the component set, hold down every shortcut there is...

'Command Option Shift R'... that's Mac, and it's 'Ctrl Alt Shift R'... basically I'm just clicking that button there... I'm trying to impress you with my knowledge of shortcuts... well, you need to know that one off by heart, no, but there you go... it resized the component set to kind of just wrap this up in it.

So what I want to do is, just this one... I'm just going to play with size and scale, and just kind of like move it around... because there's a bit of transparentness and a bit of blurring, and stuff... I'm going to see how good this is, so think scale... and rotation... and I'm hoping we might get something, we might get some magic...

"It doesn't look like magic, Dan."  That's our animation, so I'm going to switch to--  so 'Shift E', oh, look at that, that's not meant to be there... I copied and pasted this... just to kind of save time to put all the rounded corners on... and I thought I deleted everything... but it didn't delete the Prototype that was in there, go away... cool, I want you to go to, you...

and I want you to go to, after a delay of 0 milliseconds... which will jump back up to 1 millisecond... I want to get to do a 'Smart Animate'... I want it to Ease In and Out, you can play around with Easing, what you want... and how long? I want it to take 5 seconds, I want to be like slow and moody...

5 seconds is 5000 milliseconds... and when that one is done I want to go back here... and it remembers half of what you did. It remembers the smart animation, ease in and out, five seconds... but it doesn't remember this for some reason... after a delay of 1 millisecond...

the rest is okay... now we get to use it, we can say, let's switch to the 'Assets' panel... let's practice our-- who remembers what switching to the Asset panel is, shortcut? Have I ever mentioned it? It's 'Option 2'... 'Option 1' and 'Option 2' on a Mac toggles between layers...

can you see, layers and assets, it's 'Alt 1' and 'Alt 2' on a PC. So I'm going to switch those two, I'm going to dump you in there... you can see, that's why this animation is bigger than I need it... because I get to dump it into all sorts of frame sizes, and it will fit... now I can click on this, and I'm probably going to start a flow here... just so that it doesn't jump up to this one here that I've already got...

I'm going to click on this, and I'm going to hit 'Play'. The other thing is, when you've got a flow... you can see I've got the Play button there, which is handy... now, wait for the magic... was it good? It's no stripe, did you get the idea?

I bet you, if you're doing it yours will look way different... I practiced this before, I done this one, it might look really good... because it looks really average... there you go, sometimes it's just the shape you pick... and the different gradients that you decide on, and the animation... maybe it needs to go slower...

maybe I need a bit more transparency going on. The one thing, actually, that you'll notice is that... there's a little jump in mine, mine has a little, like jump--  let's see if we can find it after the five seconds, wait for it, about now... no about now, wait for it... can you see that jump? Oh, you saw it there...

editor, can you jump that one again, or repeat it? I worked backwards when I was testing, I was like... I've never seen that happen before... I don't know if it's a me problem or it's a current version of Figma problem... or it's always been there, swear it hasn't always been there... but basically if you remove the blurs off these animations it goes away...

so something to do with the blur, I don't know what it is... but hopefully it's not on your version... and it's gone away by the time you watch this video... let's tidy this up, because we talked about it being cleaner... and at the moment, 'Shift 1', it is not clean now... we've just got to join animation over here...

but what we can do is we can delete it, completely delete our main component set... because we've got it in here, we can say--  I'm going to go back to 'Shift E', back to Design view... I'm going to go inside of here and I'm going to say, 'Main Component'... 'Restore the Main Component', and it comes back, 'Shift 1'. So you can keep it tidy by just doing that, or you can cut it... and put it on its own page, so we're going to go, 'New Page'...

we're going to call this one "Animation", I'm going to paste it on here... and I'm going to put all my animations on this page... I'm going to go back to page one, using a sweet shortcut of PgUp/PgDn... I know some keyboards don't have up and down, you know, page numbers... so if you've got like a MacBook Pro, that I sometimes work from... when I haven't got a keyboard plugged into...

I have to hold down some function key to get that to work... have a look at your laptop, see if there is a PgUp/PgDn... whether that's actually useful, if you have to hold down a bunch of keys... if you do, it is a great way of going between your pages. So back to Page 1, and this one here, I'm going to... 'Command Option Enter', or 'Ctrl Alt Enter'...

on a PC... and look at my sweet animation... I'm not sure what we're looking at again but look how tidy it is... look at that, it's all by himself, and over here is my lovely animation. That is it, I think... what we should do now is go and name all my vectors, and name all my variants...

I promise, Scout's Honor, that's what I'm just about to do... or it's late enough in the day, and I'm losing my voice, you can hear that... from talking into the microphone all day, and yeah, we'll leave it there... you go name your variants, I'll go do mine later on... all right, that is it, I will see you in the next video.