Creating animated stickers for social media using Adobe Photoshop

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to go through the pipeline of creating social media stickers from an idea to a finished product, while studying whether or not Photoshop is a feasible tool for such a project. Social media stickers have become widely used and more popular over the years, making them a viable tool for marketing. This spawned the idea to work with a client to create an animated set of social media stickers.

The thesis goes through the principles of animation and uses these to see how well the animation pipeline in Photoshop fares to more commonly used animation software.

It was found that while Photoshop can be used for small animated projects, it is not suitable for larger projects as it severely lacks some of the tools that are vital to create fluid, appealing animations.

Animation students and those interested in learning how to animate in Photoshop can use this thesis as a beginning point to familiarize themselves with what it is like to animate in Photoshop, and whether or not they want to use such a tool for animation.