How Animate It works

Getting started

1. Select one or more layers on the canvas. Text, frames, shapes, and groups all work.
2. Pick a preset. The tile previews it, and the right column shows its clips.
3. Press Apply. The keyframes start at the playhead. A new frame's timeline ends exactly where the animation ends, so a loop has no dead time; inside a frame you already had, the timeline only grows.
4. Open the timeline in Figma to play it, scrub it, or keep editing the keys by hand.

Selected several layers? They play one after another. See Several layers.

Presets

A preset is a named stack of clips. There are 109, in seven groups:

Entrance

The layer arrives: fades, slides, pops, drops.

Exit

The layer leaves. Put it at the end of a scene.

Emphasis

A short beat on something already there: shake, tada, heartbeat.

Loop

Motion that repeats cleanly. Turn on loop in Figma's timeline.

UI

Micro-interactions for prototypes: press, tap, error shake, success, like, ping, shimmer.

Draw

Lines and pen paths that draw on, erase, or trace. Select several icons and they draw in turn.

Text

Presets that split text into letters, words, or lines and stagger them.

Picking a preset doesn't touch your file. Only Apply does, so try as many as you like.

Clips

A clip is one move: a fade, a fly, a hop. Presets are clips stacked together. Ball Bounce, for example, is a Fly, a Hop, and a Squash on each landing. Add clips with +, drag them to reorder, and click one to open its settings. There, Hide clip leaves a clip out of the preview, Apply, and the exported code without deleting it; its row turns faint until you show it again.

Good to know

Vary

On split text or several layers, each piece gets its own random amount. It's what makes Scatter Out scatter.

Shadow, Outline, Corners

Add to what the layer already has, and keep its shadow and stroke color.

Color

Changes a solid fill or stroke, not gradients or images. Random gives each piece its own color.

Draw

Only on open paths, like a line or a pen path, with a centered stroke.

Build a stack

A preset is clips on one timeline. Clips that start together combine into one move. A clip that starts later plays after. Drag a bar to move it, or drag either end to make it longer or shorter. Apply writes that timeline as keyframes on Figma's Motion timeline.

Timing

Each clip has a bar under it. Drag the bar to move when the clip starts, and drag its end to change how long it lasts.

When two overlapping clips touch the same property, they combine: moves, rotation, and blur add up, while scale and opacity multiply. A Fly plus a Wiggle is a fly that wobbles on the way in.

Easing shapes each move. Ease out starts fast and lands softly. Ease out back overshoots a little and settles, which is good for pops. Linear keeps one speed, which is good for spins.

A pause at the end. Add a Wait clip after the last clip. It moves nothing; it holds the end pose for its length, so a loop rests before it repeats. Nudge is built that way: a short wiggle, then a 1.4s wait.

px and %

Distances (Fly, Move, Wiggle, Hop, Blur) can be pixels or a percent of the layer. Switch with the unit next to the field.

• % scales with the layer. A 50% fly moves a small icon a little and a big card a lot, so the motion feels the same on both. X uses the width, Y uses the height, and Blur uses the shorter side.
• Split text measures % on one line instead: a 50% rise moves each piece half a line, whether the text is one line or ten. Bigger type still moves more; more text doesn't.
• px is exact. Use it when a layer has to land on a specific spot.

The clip panel shows what a % comes to in pixels on your selection, so there's nothing to work out.

Most built-in presets use %, so one preset looks right on a button and on a hero image.

Text split

With a text layer selected, Split text in the stack cuts it into pieces, and each piece gets the whole stack:

Letters

Every character. Lively. Best for short words and titles.

Words

Reads naturally. The usual choice for headlines.

Lines

Calm. Good for paragraphs and lists.

The text layer becomes a frame of separate text pieces, each placed where Figma drew it, so spacing and line breaks stay the same. The pieces are ordinary text layers, so you can still restyle them after.

Stagger and order

Stagger is the gap between one piece starting and the next. With 0.05s, piece 0 starts at once, piece 1 at 0.05s, piece 2 at 0.1s, and so on. Order decides which piece goes first. Try them here; the number under each piece is its turn.

Forward

Start to end, the way you read.

Reverse

End to start.

Center out

The middle first, then outward in pairs. Feels like it opens up.

Edges in

Both ends first, meeting in the middle.

Random

Scattered. The same text always shuffles the same way, so applying again gives the same result.

A good start: 0.03–0.05s for letters, 0.08–0.12s for words, 0.15–0.25s for lines. Longer text needs a smaller stagger, or the last piece waits too long.

Several layers

Select several layers and they play one after another, with the same stagger and orders as text. Line up sets who counts as first: row by row, left to right, or top to bottom.

Change it in preset settings, under Selected layers. A stagger of 0 moves them all together.

Speed and delay

The button on the stack opens preset settings, with a preview at the top.

• Speed plays the whole stack faster or slower. 2× is half as long, and the clips keep their proportions.
• Delay waits before anything moves. Use it to line up several layers: the title at 0s, the subtitle at 0.3s, the button at 0.6s.
• With a split on, Stagger and Order are here too.

Your presets

Change any preset and a dot appears after its name, with Reset under it to go back. Press the save button (the bookmark next to the code button) to name it and save it. Saved presets show up under Your presets, keep their split and stagger, and stay with you in every file. On one of your presets, the same button saves your changes over it; Save as new preset and Delete preset are at the bottom of the panel.

Wrap layer

In settings (the gear), Wrap layer in a frame is on by default. It puts each animated layer in a frame of the same size and place, so the animation gets a timeline of its own and the layer looks unchanged. That timeline is set to the animation's length. Turn it off to keep your layers panel exactly as it is.

Recipes

Limits

• Text split handles up to 300 letters, 120 words, or 40 lines. For longer text, split by a larger piece.
• Free includes 37 presets, clips such as fade, move, blur, flip, and pulse, and up to 3 clips in a stack. Pro unlocks the rest of the catalog, splitting any other stack, and saving presets.