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

Creating your first project in Adobe AE – an animated check icon

Cool, let me recap a bit here. Sometimes you may think, why go through all this effort to create an animation if we could just have a text or an illustration instead? Well, as we mentioned earlier, animations can be so helpful in terms of UX. They help us to talk to our users; we've learned how animation can communicate so many things, such as actions or emotions.

If we go back to our brief, remember we've decided to create a check icon that will show the user the purchase has been successfully made and the money is safe and well spent.

So, in UX terms, what sort of emotions do we want our users to feel? I guess something like the following:

  • Safety: The purchase has been made correctly.
  • Relief: The money hasn't been lost in the middle of the transaction.
  • Excitement: Imagine the feeling you have after treating yourself to a new T-shirt. Exciting, right?

When animating...