Adobe Creative Cloud Design Tools All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 3: Symbols and Animation

In This Chapter

• Understanding symbols and the library
• Creating and editing symbols
• Working with frames and keyframes in the Timeline
• Creating animations with tweens
• Understanding frame-by-frame animation
• Working with the frame rate

After you get familiar with the Flash drawing tools, you'll want to dive in to what Flash is best known for: animation. In this chapter, you bring your creations to life with movement, interactivity, and sounds. In an effort to bring motion to the mobile masses, Flash CS6 introduced new options for publishing your animation to HTML that took Flash in a new direction as a multi-platform animation and rich media tool.

Before beginning with animation, it's essential to explore two central concepts in Flash: symbols and the library. Because the symbol is an essential part of creating animation in Flash, we show you how to create and modify symbols before you dive in to your first animation tasks.

Visiting the Library

Each Flash document contains a library, a repository of reusable graphics, animations, buttons, sounds, video, and even fonts. As you build your Flash movie, you can add any piece of artwork you've imported or created on the stage to the library, where it's stored as a symbol, as shown in Figure 3-1. You manage your library from the Library panel, which is visible in the default workspace. If you don't see your Library panel, choose WindowLibrary to open it.

What makes symbols powerful is that you can reuse ...