How to add design tool pins and grids in After Effects

Design tool overlays, the little squares on every corner, the curved handles and the dotted grid, tell the viewer that they are looking at something being designed. Building them by hand means a shape layer per pin and a lot of keyframes. The Pins&Grid tab in MotionUI builds them from your layers and keeps them editable.

What you need

• After Effects with the MotionUI panel.

• MotionUI Pro, Pins&Grid is part of it.

1. Rig your layers

Select shape, text or vector layers and open the Pins&Grid tab. Under Rig, pick a pin system: Basic Pins, Bezier Handles, Bounding Box, Text Selector or Smart Bounds.

2. Style the pins

Under Pin Style, choose Rectangle or Circle, the size, roundness, stroke width, fill and stroke. Handle Style does the same for bezier handles. Apply to Existing Pins restyles a rig you already built.

3. Add guides

The Guides tab adds comp guides, margins and construction guides for logos, straight or as arcs.

4. Animate the rig in

In the Animate tab, pick how the pins arrive (Pop, Scale In, Fade, a slide or Trim Path for lines), the order and the direction, then click Apply Animation.

5. Add a texture

The Textures tab puts a grid, dots, lines or a checker pattern behind your scene. Keep it subtle, an opacity of 10 to 25 percent reads well behind UI.

Open the project file

The project file holds the animation from the top of this site: dashed guides draw in, a box closes around the MotionUI mark and pins with bezier handles appear on every point, over a fine dot grid.

1. Open Pins and Grid.aep and the comp Pins and Grid.

2. MUI_RIG_Vector puts a pin on every point of the mark and draws its bezier handles. MUI_CTRL_BEZIER styles pins, handle dots and handle lines.

3. MUI_RIG_Vector_2 is the frame with the dashed guides. MUI_CTRL_MARGIN sets its stroke and the gap between the inner and outer box. MUI_CTRL_DOTS_TEXTURE does the same for the dot grid.

The project needs no fonts and uses no third-party plugins.