In recent years, the word "Lottie" can be often seen in mentions throughout a variety of digital platforms: in Medium articles, Upwork orders, and podcasts about modern technologies. Such business giants as Duolingo, Stripe, and Disney are proud to use this technology in their products.
But is there a reason for companies not on the Forbes's Top 100 list to use Lottie? What are the benefits of Lottie for design? Keep reading, and find out by the end of this article.
A little background on the format: Lottie was born within the walls of the Airbnb company in 2015. Airbnb was founded by designers that could feel the unfortunate decline of Adobe Flash Player. And they had the skill and drive to create a perfect successor for dying-out software, all while preventing it from the sad fate of Flash.
Lottie is an open-source format, so there is no reason to be afraid of its untimely demise like it happened with its predecessor. In the year of 2017, Bodymovin, the main engine for Lottie animations was released. And thus, Lottie has grown from a convenient internal tool into a widely beloved technology, and now we can enjoy the benefits of the Lottie animation library collectively as a public.
Lottie has begun to function completely separately from Airbnb as its own format. And since then its popularity has only continued to grow.
Lottie is a great animation format for a range of reasons, some are more general, and others can be more specific. A short version:
But that’s just the basics. Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of the Lottie design tool by categories.
Lottie files weigh 20-30 (sometimes 200) times less than GIF and PNG sequences. Thus, your products will load much faster without losing their attractiveness. Yes, using Lottie in your work will increase the speed and maximize disk space, unlike all other video formats. And that’s a big step for efficiency and performance you will not find in any other format.
Lottie animation library for businesses is widely used. It’s a cross-platform tool, as mentioned before, so it’s used practically everywhere. In a way, Lottie is like a Doom game: if there’s a display, animations will play wherever modern Javascript is supported.
You can use one animation on both a 10-meter TV and a smartwatch, and the animations will always be played in the best quality relative to each screen resolution. No pixelation, no drop in the quality, no matter how small or how big the size of a file gets, no matter the size of a display. Fantastic, isn’t it?
Lottie animation for developers is a convenient tool as well. You can use Lottie in all environments that support JSON. It allows you to change animation colors and customize interactivity, among other possibilities.
You can place markers in the animation you work on, and if you are lucky with a designer, they will leave your markers in place. Thanks to that little trick, setting up interactivity will become an even easier process, relieving you of a few struggles and making your life simpler.
Get this: Lottie is the most popular animation format for the web right now. That means the chances of you being left one on one with your problem are incredibly low, as there is a large community of developers online, with forums, discussions, and solutions easily searched on Google.
Great news: Lottie is available to use with Webflow! Just drag the animation to the canvas and customize it in a special panel. Yes, it is literally as easy as that.
First, you have After Effects with its myriad plugins, then you can animate with Figma thanks to the Ukrainian plugin aninix (and you can even create components with Lottie animations!). Aside from that, you can also discover generative animations in the cavalry – so many choices!
Leave maiden instructions that will be integrated directly into JSON and show a manager and customer the visualized animation without having to write code. Do you know any other format that is as efficient as this one to designers?
Lottie animation for designers is a format that brings a lot of flexibility. You can use vectors from Figma and illustrator, PNG, JPG, SVG, and even sew audio into the animation. Flexibility and versatility of Lottie is truly impressive.
Basically, Lottie is like a Ferrari: extremely powerful and widely appealing, even though not without its own flaws.
Lottie has a lot of practical use and brings a lot of benefits with using it in web development. Animations based on JSON files allow more flexibility in incorporating various designs while keeping the size of the files significantly smaller compared to its competitors. It’s high quality, it’s scalable, and honestly, what more could you need?
Unfortunately, this technology is not very friendly for beginners. It can take up to several months to get used to it and understand how it works properly to get to love it with a full heart. Lottie does not always behave predictably, so you need to keep looking for non-trivial ways to visualize shadows, blurs, and other similar things.
But websites and web apps with unique animations do tend to attract and engage much more users, so in the end, it is definitely worth the trouble. If you want to get the most out of Lottie, we suggest hiring professionals to handle it for you.
If you don’t want to go through the hustle of creating animations yourself, and want to only enjoy the final result, we got your back! Feel free to entrust this process to us, and we will make sure to bring you a top-quality product while relieving you of all the stress of going through it yourself.
We have been working with this format for more than two years and have created several hundred animations for 30+ projects. We work with a variety of companies with different needs, so we’ve learned to be flexible and productive, finding a personalized approach to each project, business, and industry. Our services are time-efficient and affordable, and we strive to get results done. Contact WarmDevs today and get custom Lottie animations for your project!
We love opportunities to implement Lottie into our projects, so we gathered a few cases where you can see examples of our animation work:
Lottie is an animation format based on JSON. This technology is widely used, as it brings a lot of advantages, among which are size, flexibility, and scalability. You can transfer Lotties to any platform as if you were transferring static formats. It’s small, works everywhere, and doesn’t lose its quality while scaling.
Bodymovin Lottie animation for designers is a great tool in web development. Lottie is supported by the majority of available platforms, both web, and mobile, which makes it pretty much universal. The size of a Lottie file is much smaller than that of a GIF, PNG, or basically any other popular format. This means JSON files are much more beneficial for loading speed, aside from the versatility mentioned above.
Yes, it does. You can upload Lottie animations through Webflow, which is among the advantages of Lottie bodymovin for developers, as it’s quite convenient to work with. You can export an After Effects file in a format of JSON files using the bodymovin plugin, as well as straight up get the best of free animations presented in the Lottiefiles library, as well as other animation galleries.
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