How to Animate a Logo: Your Crash Course

Back in the day, all you had to consider when designing a logo was how it’d look in print and in your website’s navigation bar. Those days are over. Today, you also have to worry about how your logo will look in videos on social media and your website.

With 89% of businesses using video marketing in one form or another, you have to take into account the logo’s motion design from the very start. Here’s how to animate a logo, based on Fivecube’s motion design experience.

What Is an Animated Logo?

An animated logo uses motion design to add movement to an otherwise static logo. For example, a moving logo can slide into the frame, scale up or down, fade in and out, or bounce. You can also have a specific element moving in a logo:

Why Use a Moving Logo Instead of a Static One?

Moving logos have multiple advantages over static ones. For one, any sort of motion automatically draws users’ attention and captures it longer. Studies have also shown that animation facilitates recall, which means animated logos can make your brand more memorable.

On top of that, animated logos can tell stories and evoke emotions in a way that static images simply can’t. So, with their help, you can take your brand storytelling to a new level and pave the way for higher engagement among your target audience.

Common Use Cases for Animated Logos

You can use motion logos in:

Intros and outros in branded videos
Presentations
Email signatures
Social media content
Corporate website design
Digital product interfaces (loading screen, etc.)

8 Steps for Animating a Logo

Here’s how to animate your logo in eight steps, based on our experience at Fivecube:

Prepare your logo. It should be a vector image; otherwise, you risk quality issues. Make sure to use a high-resolution version with a transparent background.
Make sure you have the right skills. It’s easy to make mistakes in motion design. If your vision is quite complex and unusual and you don’t have experience with motion design, consider hiring a design agency to animate your logo.
Plan out the keyframes. Think of them as wireframes for your animated logos that reflect the key stages in the animation sequence. You can sketch those keyframes by hand or prepare low-fidelity renderings digitally.
Choose the right tool. You can create animated logo designs with beginner-friendly tools like Canva or industry-standard ones like Adobe After Effects. Your choice will depend on your skill set and the level of flexibility you need to execute your idea.
Animate different elements. If you decide to add motion to separate elements of the logo, you’ll need to break down the logo into independent components first. That might require some reworking of your logo.
Apply keyframes and effects. This is the nitty-gritty of animation: defining starting and ending positions for different elements, adding and mixing effects, and so on.
Export the animated logo. The result can be a GIF with a transparent background or an MP4 file. The former works best for becoming part of the UI design, the latter will be suitable for use in video content.
Test and refine. Preview your exported logo across different media and remove any hiccups in the motion design. Ask for feedback from stakeholders and refine the logos accordingly.

Here’s how to animate your logo in eight steps, based on our experience at Fivecube:

Prepare your logo. It should be a vector image; otherwise, you risk quality issues. Make sure to use a high-resolution version with a transparent background.
Make sure you have the right skills. It’s easy to make mistakes in motion design. If your vision is quite complex and unusual and you don’t have experience with motion design, consider hiring a design agency to animate your logo.
Plan out the keyframes. Think of them as wireframes for your animated logos that reflect the key stages in the animation sequence. You can sketch those keyframes by hand or prepare low-fidelity renderings digitally.
Choose the right tool. You can create animated logo designs with beginner-friendly tools like Canva or industry-standard ones like Adobe After Effects. Your choice will depend on your skill set and the level of flexibility you need to execute your idea.
Animate different elements. If you decide to add motion to separate elements of the logo, you’ll need to break down the logo into independent components first. That might require some reworking of your logo.
Apply keyframes and effects. This is the nitty-gritty of animation: defining starting and ending positions for different elements, adding and mixing effects, and so on.
Export the animated logo. The result can be a GIF with a transparent background or an MP4 file. The former works best for becoming part of the UI design, the latter will be suitable for use in video content.
Test and refine. Preview your exported logo across different media and remove any hiccups in the motion design. Ask for feedback from stakeholders and refine the logos accordingly.

Here’s how to animate your logo in eight steps, based on our experience at Fivecube:

Prepare your logo. It should be a vector image; otherwise, you risk quality issues. Make sure to use a high-resolution version with a transparent background.
Make sure you have the right skills. It’s easy to make mistakes in motion design. If your vision is quite complex and unusual and you don’t have experience with motion design, consider hiring a design agency to animate your logo.
Plan out the keyframes. Think of them as wireframes for your animated logos that reflect the key stages in the animation sequence. You can sketch those keyframes by hand or prepare low-fidelity renderings digitally.
Choose the right tool. You can create animated logo designs with beginner-friendly tools like Canva or industry-standard ones like Adobe After Effects. Your choice will depend on your skill set and the level of flexibility you need to execute your idea.
Animate different elements. If you decide to add motion to separate elements of the logo, you’ll need to break down the logo into independent components first. That might require some reworking of your logo.
Apply keyframes and effects. This is the nitty-gritty of animation: defining starting and ending positions for different elements, adding and mixing effects, and so on.
Export the animated logo. The result can be a GIF with a transparent background or an MP4 file. The former works best for becoming part of the UI design, the latter will be suitable for use in video content.
Test and refine. Preview your exported logo across different media and remove any hiccups in the motion design. Ask for feedback from stakeholders and refine the logos accordingly.

5 Best Practices for Animating a Logo

It’s easy to get motion design wrong. Here’s how to make animated logo designs that surprise and delight users, based on our experience in motion design services.

Choose the Right Duration

Twenty-second logo intros are a sure way to lose your viewers’ attention. So, aim to keep your animation under 10 seconds long for use in videos. Logos with movement for UI design should be even faster, up to two seconds.

Keep It Simple

Making logos overly complex is one of the most common logo mistakes we encounter at Fivecube, and this applies to animated logos as well. Avoid incorporating too many moving elements at once or using animations that are too complex for the intended use. Website visitors won’t be able to make out complex animations if your logo is a tiny image in the navigation bar.

Align It with Your Brand Identity

Before you rush into animating your logo, make sure that an animated logo will match your brand identity and prepare guidelines for ensuring it. That requires a careful assessment of your brand and its visual identity tenets (colors, fonts, etc.), like the one we completed for HYCM when designing the customer portal.

Mix and Match Effects for Maximum Impact

A simple fade-in or slide-in effect could be considered a relic instead of a classic these days. To wow your audience, go beyond a single effect: combine bounces, rotations, reveals, and so on to make your animated logo truly attention-grabbing.

Pay Attention to Your Use Cases

Where and how you’ll use your animated logo will dictate its size, resolution, animation duration, and the acceptable motion complexity. Or, in other words, logo animation for a website header won’t be the same as one for a branded video intro.

Final Thoughts

An animated logo is a must if you want to add character to your brand or promote it with video content. However, it should be conceived with specific use cases and goals in mind. So, make sure you have your brand identity and marketing strategy sorted out before diving into motion design for logos.

Ready to breathe life into your logo? At Fivecube, we routinely turn static images into powerful storytelling devices. Get in touch with our motion designers to discuss how we can help you turn your logo into an impactful animation for the intended platforms and use cases.

Aug 19, 2025

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