What is Lottie animation?

Published on December 27, 2023

In simpler terms, lottie is what makes the life of an animator easier. It makes their animations smoother without distorting its quality. But that’s easier said than done, isn’t it?

Well, it wasn’t always this easy. For decades, animators strived to bring a balance between top-quality graphics and a cost-effective process of storing, shipping, and rendering them. With Lottie, animators find this balance. It helps to bring dynamic features in animation without ruining the quality or smoothness. In this way, animators make a difference in the modern attention industry at a minimal cost.

Until now! Enter Lottie – a lightweight animated graphics format that solves this problem. Lotties will make applications smaller and more robust whilst incorporating a number of dynamic features that are not possible with traditional graphics formats.

You may wonder, how Lottie does that?

Well, lottie is basically an effective animation tool or in other words, a JSON-based animation file format. Due to its light-weightedness, Lottie helps to get rid of the animators’ worry. This particular format allows animators to place their animators on any platform they like. Be it web or mobile, animators can scale their animations up and down without interfering with the quality of the resolution.

The Usage of a Lottie

As mentioned just above, the usage of a lottie could be anywhere you like. You can incorporate it in both web and app pages just as smoothly as integrating static images. Fun fact is, you can also use it as stickers on messaging platforms or desktop apps. Lottie comes with smart and cool features that helps to make your animations more interactive.

The Size of a Lottie

Well, Lottie is small. Very, very small.

Let’s put it in terms of the popular Marvel characters. If PNG is Hulk, GIF is Captain American, and Lottie is Ant Man. Makes sense?

Now, our dear Ant Man helps to increase download speed while decreasing the volume of computer disk occupied.

The Benefits of Lottie

1. Being multi-platform, Lottie’s adaptability enables it to be used on iOS, Android, web and React Native without the need for modification.
2. As we told you already, it’s Ant Man sized.
3. In order to add interactivity into animations and manipulate them according to your will at run-time, Lottie uncovers unique animation elements and parameters to be used as targeting elements.
4. It is scalable at run-time and is liberal of any resolution.
5. Following up on the previous point, the quality of Lottie files doesn’t rely on pixels or any other issue that concerns resolution. They are made up of code that describes moving vectors. This implies that even if you increase the size of your animations to full screen, the quality will remain unchanged.
6. Lottie is easier to read. It is storied as plain text and this implies that it’s easily-readable by humans. Another advantage of having plain texts is that it is easy to handle and refine Lottie animations without the need for unique software tools. One less hassle!

Get Access to Lottie

Platforms such as LottieFiles can help you find these wonderful lottie animations. If you’re skilled in web development, you can get access to your lottie animation through LottieFiles. After you get your hands on them, you can easily import and preview them. Later on, it will provide you with a few lines of code that can direct you in placing your lottie animation wherever you like. 

In case you are not too sure about web development, well, you mustn’t sweat it because LottieFiles got it all figured out. From their marketplace, you can directly download your preferable Lottie animations. 

At Animoox, our animation team made themselves quite an expert in handling Lottie. And why not? Its small file size, versatility, and vector image quality enables our animators to bring the best outcome when it comes to delivering impactful animations at a cost-effective rate.

If you’re also looking to create dynamic animations, then Lottie is what you are looking for. But there’s so much more to know about Lottie. You may be curious about its history and the mystery behind its name. In case you are, you might want to check our next blog-post, where we trace back to Lottie’s origin.