A deep dive into the principles that separate intentional motion from decoration: easing and timing, anticipation, overshoot, follow-through, hold, and settle. The piece makes a compelling case for grounding animation in real-world physics and film editing rather than trending motion work, and lands on a point worth keeping: as AI tools make quality motion faster to produce, skill and restraint matter more, not less.

Figma’s official getting-started tutorial for Motion. The three-part structure covers agent-assisted animation (prompt it, then refine in the timeline), preset animation styles, and manual keyframing. One thing that stands out: animation built on a component automatically propagates to every instance, so you animate the play button once and every media player in the file picks it up. Motion tokens are new variable types for timing and easing, and Dev Mode now shows a Motion panel with ready-to-ship code (JSON, React, CSS) alongside the design.

Meng To, founder of Design+Code, shares his first hands-on session with Figma Motion. The tutorial runs through basic animation, auto keyframes, and agent-prompted stagger animation, then pivots to shaders — which is where it gets interesting: he animates dither and lens distortion settings over the timeline, and builds a custom Matrix-style shader from scratch using the agent with a screenshot as input. A good complement to the official Figma tutorial below, which focuses on design systems and 3D transforms — this one is messier and more exploratory, which makes it easier to follow along.