36 days of type is a well-known challenge, hosted on Instagram, that tasks creatives to design 36 letters and numbers and post them once a day for 36 days. I spend most my time with After Effects so for the 2022 challenge I decided to create all the letters using frame by frame animation.
The main goal of doing this, is that when it comes to posting work on Instagram, I can be a bit of a perfectionist. So often I won’t post work because I don’t think it is up to scratch. Instagram should be used as an outlet to explore creativity, showing behind the scenes and work in progress. When too often you can get wrapped up in comparing yourself to others’ amazing final work. I went with frame by frame as a promise to myself to create something, anything and just post it and move on.
I originally posted everything in the beige colourways below and then for the final wrap up video I introduced some bright colours to bring them all to life. You can also see as I work through the letters, the quality of the animation improves.
Above is the behind the scenes of making the ‘V’ animations. I wanted to highlight a process that I developed while producing these letters. Instead of just starting on frame 1 and then moving onto frame 2 and 3,4,5,ect… You start by drawing the start and end frames. Then you draw the middle frame and then divide again and again. Basically, you create an animation that’s only 5 frames and then fill in the in-between frames to make it smooth.
Below are some individual videos that I think turned out quite well.