Book Image

UI Animations with Lottie and After Effects

By : Mireia Alegre Ruiz, Emilio Rodriguez Martinez
Book Image

UI Animations with Lottie and After Effects

By: Mireia Alegre Ruiz, Emilio Rodriguez Martinez

Overview of this book

Lottie is a small and scalable JSON-based animation file. LottieFiles is the platform where Lottie animations can be uploaded, tested, and shared. By combining the LottieFiles plugin and the LottieFiles platform, you’ll be able to create stunning animations that are easy to integrate in any device. You’ll also see how to use the Bodymovin plugin in After Effects to export your animation to a JSON file. The book starts by giving you an overview of Lottie and LottieFiles. As you keep reading, you’ll understand the entire Lottie ecosystem and get hands-on with classic 2D animation principles. You’ll also get a step-by-step guided tour to ideate, sketch for storytelling, design an icon that will fulfill the needs and expectations of users based on UX, and finally animate it in Adobe After Effects. This will help you get familiar with the After Effects environment, work with vector shape layers, create and modify keyframes using layer properties, explore path and mask features, and adjust timing easily to create professional-looking animations. By the end of this animation book, you’ll be able to create and export your own Lottie animations using After Effects and implement them in mobile apps using React Native. You’ll also have an understanding of 2D animation best practices and principles that you can apply in your own projects.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1 - Building a Foundation With After Effects and LottieFiles
5
Part 2 - Cracking Lottie Animations
9
Part 3 - Adding Your Lottie Animations Into Mobile Apps

Chapter 2: Creating the Illusion: Get Rolling With the Basic Principles of 2D Classic Animation

What exactly is animation? From animated basic GIFs to large motion graphics movies, we can find animations in almost every single online piece. But, why is animation so important? Because by adding animations and micro-animations to our websites and apps, it will help us to communicate with our users in so many ways. It will attract attention, increase user engagement, communicate feedback, help us lead the user and the user behavior, and enrich the user experience (UX).

In this chapter, we will focus on 2D classic animation and its 12 principles. We will first start by briefly reviewing the history and foundations of animation and the different techniques used to create an illusion.

Once we've seen that, we will learn the 12 principles of animation, which will help us to make our animations look more realistic. We will also learn how to set everything up with just a pencil and...