Tutorial from Samarth Jajodia on creating a cool animation with a few shapes, gradients, and blend modes with Smart Animate.

Cool technique from Nitish Khagwal for creating animated liquid mesh gradients.

A simple but fun technique for creating cool animations with mirrored components.

Lauren shows how to create a micro animation (also known as micro interaction) using a heart icon. These interactions add a really fun touch, and I love that the tutorial uses a heart icon from another tutorial by Miggi.

With the Walkthrough widget, you can give your stakeholders an interactive tour with smooth animations without being there yourself. You can use it to introduce file content or explain a complex flow.

One-click export of Figma prototypes and animations to GIF, WebM, or MP4.

“The plugin Shape Move is specifically designed to allow you to create more dynamic and engaging animations within designs by animating the anchor points of vector shapes. An anchor point is a fixed point on a graphic object that serves as a reference for scaling, rotating, and positioning. You are able to customize the timing and easing of the animations, as well as the duration and delay of each animation.” See an impressive demo video.

Christine Vallaure shares a few practical prototyping techniques and advanced tips & tricks. They include using Auto Layout with Smart Animate, stateful transitions with sections, nesting prototypes, interactive components, and more. This video is also available as an article.

If that game wasn’t enough, check out these spatial 3D animations made using SkewDat plugin. There is a tutorial as well.

“This workshop will be a deep dive into the prototyping features in Figma. We will cover many of the basic frame-to-frame navigation prototypes for devices, and touch upon some of the more advanced capabilities that you can unlock with video, interactive components, and sections.”

“In this workshop we will cover how to apply motion and animation when prototyping with Figma. We will cover concepts like transitions, delays, timing, smart animate, and interactive components.”

Yet another fantastic tutorial by Double Glitch. The use of dodge & burn in animations is really smart and produces a beautiful effect.

Figbruary submissions keep delivering gems! Double Glitch shows the behind-the-scenes process of making a cool animated light switch.

Remember the gooey blobs in the previous issue? Well, Double Glitch took it to the next level with this Lava lamp demo. Beautiful effect and a very creative technique! See also this liquid swipe transition using the same approach.

Pretty cool tutorial and community file on creating custom animated blobs without any plugins. A really smart technique combining blur with classic dodge & burn!

Vijay Verma with a smart workaround for rotating an object reflection with the key object. (And here is another one, if that wasn’t enough!)

If programming shaders is a bit too much for you, check out this video on how to create an animated mesh gradient in Figma with a combination of a few plugins and built-in tools.

A short video showing how to create a hamburger menu transition in Figma.

Early beta of a new plugin for exporting Figma animations into a GIF.

While it’s easy to dismiss this and other similar projects as impractical toys, I believe they’re giving us a glimpse into the future of creative tools. Years ago every project started as a blank canvas, while now we often build on a foundation of existing design systems. I can imagine that one day the AI will generate the first iteration of the UI based on the existing design system, patterns, tone, and voice of the project.