Looking for the best Adobe Animate online classes? We’ve put together a list of the best ones on the web, below. And we’ve made sure to include both free and paid Adobe Animate courses to give you a variety of options.
But first, let’s answer the important question – what is this tool all about? Adobe animate is a creative app that allows illustrators, and other creative professionals, to create beautiful 2D images. It includes a timeline, frames, keyframes, a staging area, and a library of assets and, therefore, is a widely popular tool used to create crisp, scalable artwork.
To learn Adobe Animate, you don’t need to spend hours at University. There are plenty of online classes and courses that cover everything you need to know. Suitable for those of all levels, I have spent the time researching the best Adobe Animate courses out there. If you’re looking to progress your illustration skills, either for an illustration career or to just enhance your creative skill set, there will definitely be one for you.
1. 2D Animation For Beginners with Adobe Animate (Skillshare)
- Level: Beginner
- Completion time: 1h 14m
- Cost: 14 day free trial
- Certification: No
- Number of people who have completed the course: 9,205
- Course rating: N/A
In this class you can discover how to easily create animated videos and gifts using Adobe Animate. To start, you will cover how to use Adobe Animate correctly, including the basics of vector drawing in animate. After, you’ll take a look at using symbols and keyframes, creating guided movement with motion guides, simple frame-by-frame animations for a classic feel how to create nested animations and how to add sounds to your animations.
What is more is that the knowledge that you have learnt from the course can be applied to other animation suites, such as Adobe After Effects and Toon Boom, which makes it an incredibly versatile and useful course.
2. Adobe Animate Essential Training (LinkedIn Learning)
- Level: Beginner to intermediate
- Completion time: 2h 47m
- Cost: 1 month free trial
- Certification: Yes
- Number of people who have completed the course: N/A
- Course rating: 4.8/5 (out of 526 ratings)
If you want to use Adobe animations to create rich and expressive animations, then this course is the one for you! Course instructor Joseph Labrecque covers everything that you need to know to get up and running with Adobe animate.
To start, you’ll cover how to animate your own, original content. In this section, you will cover how to improve your animation with color management tools and how to bring your animation to life, using shape, classic and motion tweens. Finally, you’ll also cover how to add sound and common interactions so that you can take your animations to the next level. As a result of all this content, you’ll be able to walk away from this course with ready-to-use assets that will allow you to create a basic animation project.
3. Complete Adobe Animate Megacourse: Beginner to Expert (Udemy)
- Level: Beginner
- Completion time: 12h 2m
- Cost: $39.99
- Certification: No
- Number of people who have completed the course: 30,429
- Course rating: 4.4/5 (out of 266 ratings)
Taking a huge 12 hours to complete, all you need to finish this course is a positive attitude and a desire to learn! Whether you’re an artist out to create original content, a designer wanting to expand their professional profile, or someone completely new to the creative world, this course is bound to teach you something new and useful.
This course teaches you everything you need to know by following the 12 basic principles of animation, which are: squash and stretch, straight ahead, pose-to-pose, arcs, anticipation, overlapping action, follow through, secondary action, exaggeration, appeal, solid drawing and staging. As a bonus, you’ll also cover animating with speed, so that you can meet deadlines!
4. Adobe Animate Tutorials: Practical Tips, Tricks and Techniques (YouTube)
- Level: Beginner
- Completion time: 16m
- Cost: Free
- Certification: No
- Number of people who have completed the course: 8,490
- Course rating: N/A
If you’re looking for an incredibly quick and free way to up your Adobe Animate skills then this course is a great option. In only 1 minutes, you will learn how to rig a character using layer parenting, how to tween in animate, asset warping in Adobe animate and After Effects workflow.
5. Adobe Animate CC for Beginners (Skillshare)
- Level: Beginner
- Completion time: 3h 18m
- Cost: 14 day free trial
- Certification: No
- Number of people who have completed the course: 1,517
- Course rating: N/A
In this short course you can learn how to work with Adobe animate and how you can use tools to your advantage when creating animations. Course teacher Samatha Chan has a strong routed passion for Graphic design, Photo manipulation and Animation. In this course, Samantha is going to show you all the tricks and tips that she’s learnt along the way.
In just over 3 hours, you can walk away with the skills to optimize your workspace and the ability to use panel functions, toolbars, create text animations, animate shapes and create a mask effect. You will also get access to all the files used in the course so that you can refer back to them time and time again.
6. Adobe Animate 2021: The Absolute Basics [No.1] | Beginners Tutorial (YouTube)
- Level: Beginner
- Completion time: 18m 06s
- Cost: Free
- Certification: No
- Number of people who have completed the course: 263,000
- Course rating: 28,000 likes
Offered completely for free on YouTube, this 18 minute course is an excellent place to start learning about Adobe Animate. Everything will be broken down step by step so that you’ll leave this short video feeling like you have all the knowledge you need to make your first animation.
The course kickstarts by looking at the absolute basics, which includes a quick look at an example project. After, the course will quickly take you through creating an animation ready document, the interface (e.g., stage, toolbar, property panels) and then frames and keyframes before allowing you to go off and create your own animation!
7. How to Use Adobe Animate: A Tutorial for Absolute Beginners (MUO)
- Level: Beginner
- Completion time: 20m
- Cost: Free
- Certification: No
- Number of people who have completed the course: N/A
- Course rating: N/A
If watching a lengthy video isn’t for you, then you can learn some Adobe Animate skills through this blog post. In a simple, step-by-step format, you’ll cover everything from downloading Adobe animate to creating your first ever animation.
By the end of this easy read, you will understand Adobe Animates flagship features, such as tweening, frame-by-frame animation, rigged objects, and how to export features.
Conclusion
So, there you have it… the 7 best Adobe Animate online classes.
There are a huge variety of online classes available to teach you everything you need to know about Adobe Animate. Some of the tutorials are quick and free. Others are more expensive and take more time to complete but, as a result, offer a more in-depth exploration of the software. Similarly, some are better suited to complete beginners with no illustration experience. Whereas others are more suitable for experienced creatives.
All of the above online classes are excellent. They are the best of the best. Each is taught by an experienced and dedicated teacher and they all have lots of satisfied and happy customers.
So, which course you decide take depends on you experience, funds and spare time. Are you a complete illustration newbie? Or have you got years of experience in the industry and just want to refresh your knowledge? Do you have a huge amount of money to spend on your skill development? Do you have a lot of spare time, or are you just looking for a quick, but effective, skill top up?
