InDesign Animation Techniques

rosedani

Member
Hi All,

I'm in the middle of producing an interactive PDF for one of my clients and they have asked for one of the diagrams to be animated within the PDF. I understand that I can produce this animation in InDesign and export it as a swf file which I can then embed into the PDF so it plays when the page loads but I'm a bit stuck trying to achieve the desired effect!

What I'm trying to do is create a diagram which explains Cloud Computing and have data flows coming out of the supplier icons and going to the customer icon on the left. The flow has to then play the other way and show the flow of data from the customer icon to the supplier icons. This whole animation then has to loop and play again to achieve the effect of continuous data flow between the customer and suppliers.

I've attached an example jpeg to help make it a bit clearer what I'm trying to achieve (don't worry, my finished design won't look anything like this example!).

Does anyone have any good techniques on how to achieve this? I've tried the 'grow' animation but it's not quite right and I don't know how to get the whole thing looking like a continuous loop of data flow.

Thanks in advance!
Dan
 

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  • colud-artwork.jpg
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If your final export needs to be an .swf why not create it in Flash? It'll give you much more freedom and control.

InDesign is awesome for page layout and typesetting but the animation tools must be very primitive — what you want to achieve may not actually be possible.
 
Cheers both... I managed to work it out within InDesign in the end so didn't need to touch Flash... I have no clue how to use Flash so was pleased that InDesign could cope with it in the end!
 
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