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If you've ever exported a design just to animate it elsewhere, that extra step is gone. Here's what Figma just launched, and how it changes the way you animate designs.
Figma Motion, Explained
Every designer knows this workflow: you finish a design in Figma, then need it to move — a button press, a hover state, a transition — so you export, open another tool, animate it there, then bring it back and hope it still matches.
That extra hop has been a standard for years.
At Config 2026 (June 24), Figma shipped a fix: animation now lives directly on the canvas. It's called Figma Motion, and it's already rolling out — not a "coming later" announcement.
How it works
A new Motion mode sits alongside Design, Draw, and Dev modes — switch a frame into it and a timeline appears right beside your layers
Build animations from scratch with keyframes, or start from ready-made presets
Since it's built on the same canvas as your components, an animation applied once can travel across every screen and collaborator's file — the same way colors and typography already do
Export options cover CSS, JSON, React, MP4, WebM, Animated SVG, and GIF, so it hands off cleanly to developers too
It's also MCP-compatible — meaning you can pass an animated frame straight to a coding agent for implementation, instead of manually exporting and re-explaining the motion
Who this is genuinely useful for
Designers who've been exporting to separate motion tools just to animate a button or transition
Teams building design systems, since motion can now be baked into a component once and reused everywhere
Anyone handing off to developers — the direct code export cuts down on lost-in-translation animation specs
The Honest caveat
It's in open beta, available on all plans including free — but Figma has confirmed AI-assisted features will eventually consume credits once Motion moves to general availability. So the current free access isn't guaranteed to stay this way long-term.
Also, some of the more advanced capabilities — publishing animated components, high-resolution video exports, and using the AI agent to auto-generate animations — need a Full seat on a paid plan.
Helpful links:
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