Adobe Edge Animate: The Missing Manual

Chapter 2. Creating and Animating Art

As the name implies, Animate is an animation management tool. Using Edge Animate, you determine what elements show on the stage, their position, and their appearance. You can create text and simple visual elements within Animate, but it’s likely that you’ll create more complicated artwork in some other program like Illustrator, Photoshop, or Fireworks.

This chapter examines what types of graphics you can and can’t create within Animate. It starts off by defining the stage and the ways you can modify it. You’ll learn about all the properties of the rectangle and rounded rectangle. With creativity, you can also create some distinctly non-rectangular shapes. Along the way, you’ll learn how to quickly align and arrange objects on the stage and test-drive the transform and clipping tools. But you’re not stuck in Animate: You’ll also learn how to import artwork from your other favorite applications, such as Illustrator or Fireworks (and you’ll get some tips about the best free graphics programs you can find on the Web).

Setting the Stage

As the Bard said a few hundred years ago, “All the world’s a stage.” That’s certainly true in Edge Animate. As explained in Chapter 1, when you place an element on the stage, it’s visible to your audience. There are a couple of ways to hide or remove elements from the stage. If you have the stage Overflow properties set to hidden, then you can exit stage right, left, top, or bottom by moving the element off stage. At ...