Build your own panel: why your tools should fit your hands
The best After Effects workflow isn't someone else's — it's yours. A guide to customizing your AE panel around the tools you actually use, for faster motion design.
Watch two great motion designers work and you’ll notice something strange: their setups look nothing alike. One lives almost entirely on keyboard shortcuts. One has a wall of buttons. One works from a tiny, ruthlessly curated panel with maybe eight things on it. They’re all fast, and they’re all right — because there’s no single correct After Effects workspace. There’s only the one that fits your hands.
Most tools miss this completely. They hand you a fixed layout and expect you to adapt to it. But a workspace you have to adapt to is a workspace that slows you down a little, all day, forever — a pebble in your shoe you’ve stopped noticing but never stopped feeling.
What “fits your hands” actually means
It’s not decoration or aesthetics. It’s four concrete things:
- Your tools, in reach. The five things you do a hundred times a day should be one click or one keystroke away — not buried three menus deep, not on a panel you have to go find.
- Your arrangement. Vertical sidebar or horizontal toolbar? Grouped by task, or by frequency? It should map to how you think about the work, not how a plugin’s designer happened to organize a demo.
- Your names. If you call it “the bounce thing,” you should be able to find “the bounce thing.” Fighting someone else’s vocabulary is friction you don’t need.
- Your scripts. The custom tools you’ve collected and written over years shouldn’t live in a separate, forgotten panel — they should be first-class citizens, right next to (and searchable alongside) everything else.
Customization is a speed feature, not a luxury
Let’s be blunt about the stakes, because “customization” sounds soft. Every second you spend hunting for a tool is a second not spent animating. Multiply by a session, a project, a career. The fastest artists in the room usually aren’t the most gifted keyboardists — they’re the ones whose setup has near-zero friction between “I want to do X” and “X is done.” A workspace tuned to you isn’t vanity; it’s compounding time.
There’s a creative cost too. Friction breaks flow. When you have to stop and hunt mid-idea, the idea cools. A setup that stays out of your way keeps you in the work, where the good stuff happens.
How to actually tune a panel
- Start from what you touch most. Track a normal session; the tools you reach for repeatedly go front and center.
- Group by task, not by vendor. All your easing tools together, all your cleanup together — regardless of where they came from.
- Rename to your language. Make the labels match your head.
- Fold in your own scripts. Anything you’ve written or collected belongs in the same home and the same search.
- Prune ruthlessly. If you haven’t used it in a month, it’s clutter. Hide it.
How MotionSlap does it
MotionSlap ships 200+ tools so you start stocked, then gets out of your way:
- Panel Builder — drag, drop, arrange. Sidebar or toolbar, your call.
- Custom naming — call tools what you call them.
- Add your own scripts — and they land in Slap Search too, so your stuff and ours are found the exact same way.
It’s your panel. We just built the frame — a good one, stocked and searchable — and handed you the tools to make it yours. 200+ tools, one panel, twenty-nine bucks, shaped to your hands. You’re welcome.