Motion tells stories and evokes emotion. And if you’re not a fan of such sentimental phrases, then here’s another reason to use motion: it can boost user engagement, lead to higher conversion rates and higher revenue.
But motion design hasn’t always been accessible. Traditionally, you’d need a team of motion designers to craft custom animations from scratch. Then designers had to go through multiple feedback loops to make simple edits, and hand them off to developers to manually code these animations. That’s why we built LottieFiles – to make motion design easier and more accessible to everyone, whether you’re a designer, developer or marketer.
Since then, we’ve been working on making the motion design workflow even better. So we’re excited to introduce an all-new LottieFiles. You’ll find updates to features you already love, as well as new tools for collaboration, editing, optimization and shipping a Lottie animation. Plus, LottieFiles’ plugins and integrations will save countless hours for both design and development teams.
Here are the features you’ll love in an all-new LottieFiles.
1. The world’s largest, customizable animation library
LottieFiles is home to an extensive library of community-contributed animations. These animations are ready to use, free and customizable. Whatever your industry or design requirement might be, we’ve got you covered. This means that you can implement motion design on your site or app, even if you don’t have the resources to create animations from scratch. And thanks to our large Lottie community, hundreds of new animations are added every day.
To get started, just search for any animation on the LottieFiles, or check out featured animations.
2. Collaborate with your team
The all-new LottieFiles makes it easy for design teams to collaborate. Jam on projects, invite feedback, and hand over your final animation to a developer for easy implementation. To make collaboration easy, we’ve introduced two new workspaces:
- Team or company workspace – These workspaces are for teams of all sizes and organizational structures. They are unique, with dedicated admins, team members, and permission settings for every projects and role.
- Personal workspace – This is your personal space for your private projects and animation assets that you aren’t ready to share with others yet.
We’ve also implemented new features to make giving and receiving feedback easier. There’s no need to send files back and forth anymore, or to collate feedback from different channels like Slack, e-mail or even face-to-face. Just do it within LottieFiles:
- Commenting – Invite comments or feedback from stakeholders before you ship an animation.
- Animation status – Change an animation’s status during your review process. You can specify work in progress, needs review or approved.
- Team action notifications – Get notified when feedback or comments are received. Notify others across teams when a new animation version is published.
3. Test your animations across the web, iOS and Android
LottieFiles takes away a ton of expensive development hours, as there’s no need to build mock applications to test Lottie animations. Test Lottie animation on the web, or download the LottieFiles Mobile App to test it on iOS and Android platforms.
4. Optimize your Lottie and massively reduce its size
Lottie animations are more lightweight than other file types – it’s up to 600% smaller than a GIF! This means faster load times for your site or mobile app.
And now, you can optimize Lottie for an even smaller footprint. When you download your animation, you’ll see an option to download it as an optimized Lottie JSON file. An optimized Lottie is on average 20% smaller than a regular Lottie.
Or take it even further with dotLottie. A dotLottie is a zipped version of your animation, which can compress the original Lottie by a whopping 80%. You can implement dotLottie files using these open-source libraries for the web, iOS and Android.
5. Custom brand color palettes
The new Color Palette feature allows you to instantly change the colors of animations or apply your custom colors to match your brand or design. This allows you to transform any animation on LottieFiles into a visual asset that looks custom-made for your brand – in a single click. Try out Color Palette on any public animation on LottieFiles, or on animations in your team or private workspaces.
6. Export any Lottie as an MP4 or GIF
While Lottie animations work across the web, iOS and Android, some platforms don’t support them (yet!). That’s why we made it easy to convert your Lottie to other file formats, like GIF and MP4, so you can use the same asset across social media or other platforms.
7. A Lottie Editor that’s easy to use
Let’s say you’ve found the perfect Lottie animation. Or you’re a developer who has just received an animation from your design team. Just one problem – the animation is in the wrong size, is too long, has the wrong color on a specific layer, or has the wrong text.
No worries. With the Lottie Editor, you can customize each animation to your liking within minutes – without ever having to understand the complexity of motion. Over a million developers use it today without learning design or motion.
8. Track version history
Manual file versioning can get tricky. Different team members may have multiple versions of the same file, all helpfully appended with ‘final’ – animation-final.aep or animation-final-final.aep. It’s hard to track down the most updated file, and which stage of the review cycle it’s gone through – especially when external stakeholders are involved.
LottieFiles takes care of that for you. With the version history feature, you can track all changes made by anyone on your team and restore older versions anytime. Create and save new versions on the LottieFiles platform, or use LottieFiles for After Effects. Your files are automatically synced with everyone in your workspace.
9. Access your private animations via popular design platforms
Is the animation stage just one stop in your entire workflow? LottieFiles integrates with popular platforms like Adobe After Effects, Figma and Adobe XD. This means that it’s easy to take your animations into designs or prototypes – there’s no need to switch between tabs or apps to download and import the right file. Explore all of LottieFiles’ integrations here.
10. Libraries for the web, iOS, Android, interactivity and more
Over the last four years, we have open-sourced many libraries that push the limits of the Lottie file format. As a developer, this means that implementing animations – and adding interactivity – is easy. Explore libraries for the web, iOS, Android and interactivity.
Get started with the all-new LottieFiles
We hope these new and updated features make it easier to add motion on any platform. Let us know what you think, and what you’ve created with LottieFiles (psst, we’re on Twitter!). We’re also constantly improving, so stay tuned for more updates to make creating, editing and shipping motion even easier.
