The Evolution of Motion Design: How Lottie Animations are Transforming Digital Experiences

Motion design has had an incredible journey thus far, resulting in a shift in our industry. It’s no longer an afterthought, in fact, I think it has fundamentally reshaped the design landscape today.

There was a time when motion in design was considered more an embellishment and an add-on to the aesthetics of things. But this perception has radically transformed with the introduction of Lottie animations ⸺ not only for designers, but also for developers too.

Everyday experiences are now Lottie

Motion is integral in every phase of design from the initial concept to the final product. This shift is not just about making designs look good, but it’s also imperative in the way it affects the usability, storytelling, and emotional connection between a consumer and a product.

If  you take a look around, you’ll likely see motion design’s influence everywhere. Tech giant, Apple, employs Lottie animations extensively on their new product pages. Meanwhile, its known competitor, Google, has integrated over 300 Lottie animations within its Google Home app alone. The Guardian also uses Lottie animations as interactive graphics, while duolingo uses it to add delight in their digital experiences.

These examples are not isolated cases; they represent a broader trend where motion is becoming a standard expectation in digital experiences. You can check more stories on the revolutionary use of Lottie animations here.

Exploring Lottie animation: From niche to necessity

Motion design has become so indispensable⸺ in particular, Lottie animations. Lottie animations have redefined how motion is incorporated in digital experiences and products.

This widely popular animation file format is known for being lightweight because of the JSON-based format that works flawlessly across devices from desktops to smartphones. Lottie files are incredibly compact, often just a few kilobytes. For context, a typical GIF animation can range from 1MB to 5MB, while a Lottie animation might be just 60KB. Smaller sizes translate to lightning-fast load times, crucial for providing a smooth user experience, especially on mobile devices.

Before Lottie, adding animations to websites and apps was a challenging task. Designers had limited export options which often resulted in low-quality formats or requiring developers to recreate their animations from scratch. Not only was this inefficient, but it was also prone to visual deviations.

Think of Lottie animations as those ultra-portable, all-terrain gadgets that just work no matter where you take them. It’s also vector-based, which means you can scale them up or down without pixelation issues.

World’s most-loved buttons are Lottie animations

Besides usability, motion plays a large part in evoking emotion as well. It simplifies information, provides reassurance, and overall guides users’ attention, making them feel connected and engaged.

Some of the world’s most loved buttons are Lottie animations, such as the TikTok and X like buttons. YouTube’s thumbs up and the Spotify’s liked songs buttons are also Lottie animations. These animations help create a sense of delight and satisfaction, reinforcing positive user experience and emotional connections.

Powerful Lottie Runtimes

To achieve heightened user engagement, it’s essential to utilize robust Lottie runtimes. Runtimes are crucial because they enable seamless integration of animations across various platforms to ensure high performance and consistency. By using runtimes, developers can incorporate, customize, and control animations effortlessly across platforms.

LottieFiles’ new dotLottie Runtimes allows enhanced animations, faster load times, and reliable cross-platform support.  This means saying goodbye to the frustration of inconsistent animations across platforms as LottieFiles’ dotLottie Runtimes ensure feature parity across web, Android, iOS, and even small embedded systems. We call it the “dotLottie Advantage” for it brings a host of benefits:

• Reduced file size: Compress your animations by up to 80% and scale up or down without pixelation.
• Theming: Adapt your animations effortlessly for dark mode, light mode, or user-custom modes.
• Interactivity: Leverage new interactivity methods to create engaging, interactive animations across platforms.
• Bundled packages: Include multiple animations and assets in a single dotLottie file, simplifying management and deployment.
• Unmatched performance: The new dotLottie runtimes are powered by the high-performance graphics engine ThorVG. With the support for the dotLottie format which is 80% smaller than a normal JSON.
• Performance index: Our runtimes outperform the current web player by a significant margin, as demonstrated in our detailed performance index.
• JS library: Create and control dotLottie animations effortlessly with our powerful JavaScript library.

Learn more about the new dotLottie runtimes here.

Motion design is becoming an important leg in design

Let me stress this: the importance of motion design cannot be overstated. Motion is now an essential leg in the design process, influencing how products are conceived, prototyped, and brought to life. The traditional design workflow has evolved to incorporate motion at every state, ensuring that the final product is not only functional but also engaging and enjoyable for users.

Motion is able to give context, simplify complex information, build brand voices and so much more. Nevertheless, creating and implementing motion design involves collaborative efforts from various stakeholders such as visual designers, motion designers, brand designers, marketers, product designers, and developers.

Moving ahead with motion

If the prospect of leveraging Lottie animations has piqued your interest, LottieFiles is your launchpad to get started. As a comprehensive platform dedicated to the Lottie ecosystem, LottieFiles offers a suite of powerful tools that streamline the entire process from creation to implementation.

• ​​LottieFiles for Figma: With this, you can easily convert your designs or prototypes into production-ready Lottie animations with the Figma to Lottie feature. Use LottieFiles for Figma Dev Mode to get embed codes and asset links right within the tool and hand off files without hassle.
• Lottie Creator: This is a powerful web-based Lottie animation creation tool. It is designed to create ultra lightweight, highly customizable and interactive animations for web, social and apps.
• LottieFiles for Webflow: Developers can seamlessly integrate Lottie animations into their web projects with this native integration.
• LottieFiles for Canva: LottieFiles for Canva gives you access to 100,000+ free, ready-to-use customizable animations. Enhance your designs, tell better stories and engage users across your Canva projects, whiteboards, presentations, social media posts, videos and websites.
• Adobe After Effects: Easily export your animations as Lottie JSON and dotLottie. Effortlessly test, preview and implement your Lottie animations across websites, apps and other platforms.

With an extensive library, customization options, and robust developer resources, our goal is to make it easy for designers, developers, teams, and organizations to access the full potential of Lottie animations.

In a nutshell, the potential for motion design is limitless. It's an exciting time for all of us in the design community. We are not just creating visuals; we are crafting experiences that move, delight, and engage. The journey of motion is far from over, it will evolve, expand, and continuously push the boundaries of what’s possible.