Creating a custom animated email/forum signature in Flash--tutorial.jcwcn.com

Now let’s deviate from making games a bit. Flash can obviously be used for other purposes. One of them being making animated gif images. In this tutorial I explain step by step how to make a custom animated gif signature. Its pretty simple really. No coding required, just the good old frame by frame animation.

We begin by starting good old flash and opening a new flash document.

Edit the document properties as shown here.

Now I’ve made a symbol thats supposed to look like a pen called “quill”. Please forgive my excellent drawing.

Now we start making the signature.

STEP 1
Get the quill onto the stage and place it like this

STEP 2
Now use the text tool and write the text you want. You should probably use some kind of cursive font.
Alternatively you can scan your own real signature to put here.

STEP 3
Right click the text or scanned image and use “break apart”.

Use this option till its no longer available and the text/image becomes a dotted imprint.

STEP 4
Now select the first frame on the time line, and press F6 to create new frames till you have approximately n+1 frames(where n is the number of alphabets in your text)

STEP 5
Now goto the last frame(frame 16 for me), and change the quill position like this.

STEP 6
Now got to frame 15 (second of last) and use the erase tool to cut off some part of the last alphabet and put the quill image there as shown in figure.