Abstraction

The big idea: Recognising patterns → centralising the common parts.

Seeing patterns? You can gain consistency and speed by centralising those common parts.

For example: if you’re working in After Effects and all your comps share a consistent background colour, you can make a subcomp that contains a shape with the right colour. Drop that into all the comps that need that background and bish bash bosh job done.

But what if the comps are all different sizes?

Rather than making different precomps for all the different sizes, you can link an expression that only affects the colour of the shape layer. That way, no matter what size the comp is, the background shape will always be the right colour.

In that case, you could use JSON.