Animated icon (Flash tutorial)

This tutorial has tips on creating an animated icon for your profile or Shop item listings. The screenshots below are from Adobe Flash CS5.5, so the layout in CS3 or CS4 may differ slightly.

Setup Your Stage
In order for your animated GIF to play correctly as a profile icon or shop icon, it needs to be the correct size. In the properties tab, change the width to 80 pixels and the height to 60 pixels as shown below:



Add Your Animation
Using the correct stage size, you can now create an animation in that space. Things outside of the stage will not show in your animated icon.

Publish Your Icon
When you are read to publish your icon to a GIF file, your "Publish Settings" GIF tab should look like this:

(If you want a higher quality .gif you need to change the palette type from "Web 216" to "Adaptive" then adjust the max colors to "9999" as seen below, this is optional, but will create an animated .gif with higher quality animation and colors.)



Here's an example of an animated icon: