Holiday FX: Animated Snow

Mike Rankin

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In the comments for Holiday FX: Let It Snow! James Fritz mentioned that it would be cool to animate some snow. Ask and ye shall receive, Fritz.

Ok, that’s probably not what he meant. That’s more of an animated gif-alanche.

Maybe this is more like it.

Note that viewing the embedded document in full screen mode creates some weirdness with the snowflakes (they disappear before reaching the bottom of the screen). Check out the Publish Online document Happy Holidaze for the full effect.

To achieve this, I started with a vector snowflake in front of a simple radial gradient background, and some text.

Then I made a bunch of copies of the snowflake and sized each one to be either small, medium, or large. I drew some vertical lines and converted them to motion paths. I changed some of the motion paths from straight to curved. And then I used the Animation panel and Timing panel controls to vary the behavior of each animated snowflake. I also selected a few snowflakes and sent them behind the lettering in the stacking order to create a more 3D effect.

The result is a nice gentle snowfall. Though if I did it again, I’d probably also pick a few different snowflake shapes to start with, just to give it even more variation and visual interest. Still, it’s a decent little winter wonderland and it works in EPUB and Publish Online.

I’ll reveal the full step-by-step details for how to create this effect in a future issue of InDesign Magazine. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find my shovel. Those vector snowflakes are really starting to pile up under my desk.