Moving On

Figma shipped a native motion timeline this week (currently in Beta). Keyframes, presets, animated components, export to CSS, JSON, React, MP4, WebM, and Animated SVG - all in the same file as your components and your design system tokens. No separate tool. No separate handoff. No separate conversation with engineering about what the animation is supposed to do.

The last part is the one that product designers should pay attention to. Motion has always lived one tool away from everything else, which made it one conversation away, one file away, one broken-telephone moment away from shipping as something different from what was designed. Putting the timeline in the same file as the component it animates is a noticeable operational change.

It also lands at an interesting moment as designers have been quietly walking away from Adobe's subscription for a while now. Canva made Affinity free (without AI support) last October - professional-grade vector, photo editing, and layout in a single app, no monthly fee. Then in April, Cavalry followed: a 2D motion tool that many organizations had already been using to replace After Effects on motion graphics work, now completely free.

Figma Motion is different in character - it's not trying to replace After Effects. It's covering the motion work that already belonged to the product design process but kept getting exported into a separate tool anyway.

So the picture now looks like this: Affinity covers static. Cavalry covers standalone motion. Figma covers the animation that lives inside products. The parts of the Adobe stack that product and brand designers actually use every day have professional alternatives that either cost nothing or are already in their Figma seat.

Adobe still owns broadcast, compositing, and serious VFX, but it is probably only a matter of time until free or more affordable tools will catch up.