900 motion design techniques
Every technique the editor knows, with a plain definition and, for 900 of them, a live example (marked ▸). Open one to see it move, then use it in a prompt.
Principles & timing 101
Classic principles
Cycles & loops
- Breathing Idle
- Flipbook Sprite Animation
- Hop Cycle
- Idle Float Bob
- Ping-Pong Loop
- Run Cycle
- Seamless Loop
- Walk Cycle
Disney principles
- Anticipation
- Appeal
- Arcs
- Exaggeration
- Overlapping Action
- Secondary Action
- Slow In and Slow Out
- Solid Drawing
- Squash and Stretch
- Staging
- Timing
Easing
- Bounce Ease In
- Bounce Ease Out
- Custom Cubic-Bezier Easing
- Ease In Back
- Ease In Circ
- Ease In Cubic
- Ease In Expo
- Ease In Quad
- Ease In Sine
- Ease In-Out Back
- Ease In-Out Cubic
- Ease In-Out Expo
- Ease In-Out Quad
- Ease In-Out Quint
- Ease In-Out Sine
- Ease Out Back
- Ease Out Circ
- Ease Out Cubic
- Ease Out Expo
- Ease Out Quad
- Ease Out Quart
- Ease Out Sine
- Elastic Ease In
- Elastic Ease Out
- Linear Easing
- Steps Easing
Physics
- Air Drag
- Ball Bounce
- Chain Follow-Through
- Critically Damped Spring
- Friction Deceleration
- Gravity Drop
- Impact
- Inertia
- Jiggle
- Magnetic Snap
- Orbit
- Oscillation
- Overdamped Spring
- Pendulum Swing
- Perlin Noise Drift
- Projectile Arc
- Recoil
- Rubber Band Snap
- Settle
- Shake
- Soft Body Jelly
- Spring Motion
- Underdamped Spring
- Wobble
Principle sub-techniques
- Delay
- Hold
- Moving Hold
- Multiples
- Offset
- On Ones, On Twos, On Threes
- Smear Frame
- Volume Preservation
- Weight and Mass
Stagger
- Center-Out Stagger
- Eased Stagger
- Edge-In Stagger
- Grid Diagonal Stagger
- Linear Stagger
- Proximity Stagger
- Radial Stagger
- Random Stagger
- Wave Stagger
Time remapping
- Bullet Time
- Frame Interpolation
- Freeze Frame
- Hitstop
- Retiming
- Reverse Playback
- Slow Motion
- Speed Ramp
- Time Remapping
Timing & spacing
Typography 112
Counting
Credits and crawls
Depth and 3D
- 3D word cube
- Accordion fold text
- Character 3D flip
- Extrusion depth reveal
- Parallax letter layers
- Perspective tunnel type
- Text reflection shimmer
Glitch and distortion
Glyph swaps
Layout and poster
Liquid and organic
Looping and marquee
Lyrics and captions
- Bouncing ball word marker
- Karaoke highlight sweep
- Kinetic lyric typography
- Lyric line crossfade
- Pop-on captions
- Word-by-word emphasis
Masking and clipping
- Color fill rise
- Dither reveal
- Ink spread reveal
- Pixelation reveal
- Shutter slat reveal
- Text reveal through shape mask
- Video clipped inside letterforms
Mechanical display
Morphing
Motion trails
Path and orbit
Per-unit reveals
- Character blur-in
- Character drop
- Character rise
- Character rotate-in
- Character scale-in
- Character slide-in
- Curtain reveal
- Overshoot bounce-in
- Per-character fade-in
- Per-line fade-in
- Per-word fade-in
- Random-order character reveal
- Tracking in
- Tracking out
- Wipe reveal
- Word flip-in
Physics and particles
- Dissolve to particles
- Falling letter rain
- Noise dissolve
- Physics letter drop
- Spring-drag letters
- Type explosion
Scramble and decode
Shadow
Stretch and squash
Stroke and outline
Surface and light
- Chrome specular shimmer
- Gradient sweep across text
- Hue cycle fill
- Outline pulse glow
- Shine glint sweep
- Stamp impression
Titles and captions
Typewriter and terminal
- Backspace erase
- Blinking cursor
- Terminal line print
- Typed word rotator
- Typewriter reveal
- Typo-correction typing
Variable font
- Optical size shift
- Slant axis swing
- Typeface crossfade
- Variable-font weight animation
- Variable-font width animation
Wave and motion
Web and scroll
Transitions 82
Cuts
- Cut on action
- Graphic match
- Hard cut
- Insert cutaway
- Jump cut
- Match cut
- Morph cut
- Object pass-through
- Reverse motion cut
- Smash cut
- Stutter cut
Dissolves
Glitch
Interface and Views
Light and Flash
Motion Blur
Organic and Fluid
- Elastic stretch
- Ink bleed
- Kaleidoscope
- Liquid morph
- Paint brush wipe
- Ripple
- Shape morph
- Smoke dissolve
- Swirl
Page and Fold
Pixel and Mosaic
Rotation and 3D
Shape and Mask
Shatter and Break
Slides and Pushes
- Canvas pan and zoom
- Parallax slide
- Push
- Slide-over cover
- Split-screen transition
- Stacked card reveal
- Uncover
Wipes
- Barn door wipe
- Box wipe
- Checkerboard wipe
- Clock wipe
- Corner wipe
- Diagonal wipe
- Diamond wipe
- Drip wipe
- Gradient wipe
- Heart wipe
- Iris wipe
- Linear wipe
- Luma wipe
- Pinwheel wipe
- Scanline wipe
- Shutter wipe
- Spiral wipe
- Star wipe
- Venetian blinds wipe
- Zigzag wipe
Zoom
UI & interaction 121
Buttons
- Arrow slide
- Border draw button
- Fill sweep button
- Glow button
- Gradient shift button
- Hold to confirm
- Hover lift
- Liquid button
- Loading state morph
- Magnetic button
- Press depress
- Sheen sweep
- Squash on tap
- Touch ripple
Cards & media
Cursor & hover
- 3D tilt on hover
- Avatar stack spread
- Border glow follow
- Cursor follower dot and ring
- Cursor particle trail
- Cursor state change
- Dock magnification
- Image hover mask reveal
- Image hover zoom
- Particle field repel
- Pointer parallax layers
- Spotlight hover
- Underline wipe
Feedback & status
- Badge count bump
- Circle check draw
- Empty state idle loop
- Equalizer bars
- Error shake
- Loading to success morph
- Pagination pill indicator
- Progress steps connector fill
- Staged onboarding walkthrough
- Toast auto-dismiss bar
- Toast slide-in stack
Forms
Gestures & drag
- Carousel slide
- Coverflow carousel
- Drag lift with shadow
- Drop target highlight
- Momentum fling
- Pull to refresh
- Reorder list shuffle
- Row collapse removal
- Rubber band overscroll
- Swipe action row
- Swipe to dismiss
Layout & lists
Loaders
- Bouncing dots
- Grid wave loader
- Indeterminate bar
- Orbit loader
- Progress ring
- Pulse loader
- Shape morph loader
- Skeleton shimmer
- Spinner ring
- Striped progress bar
- Stroke draw logo loader
Overlays & menus
- Accordion height expand
- Bottom sheet slide-up
- Circular clip reveal
- Coachmark spotlight cutout
- Context menu origin reveal
- Dropdown stagger reveal
- Hover-reveal actions
- Modal scale-fade enter
- Radial menu fan-out
- Sidebar collapse width
- Speed dial fan
- Tooltip fade follow
Page transitions
Scroll
- Fade-up scroll reveal
- Horizontal scroll section
- Infinite marquee
- Scroll parallax layers
- Scroll pin section
- Scroll progress bar
- Scroll snap sections
- Scroll velocity skew
- Scroll-drawn SVG path
- Scroll-linked background shift
- Scroll-linked clip reveal
- Scroll-scrubbed frame sequence
- Scrollspy nav indicator
- Scrollytelling step sequence
- Shrinking sticky header
- Smooth scroll inertia
- Staggered cascade reveal
- Sticky card stack on scroll
Text & type
Theme
Toggles & controls
Shape & vector 84
Bounce & pop
Bursts & particles
Characters & rigs
Cut-out & paper
Depth & shadows
Explainer & infographic
- Callout highlight
- Connector network
- Infographic icon sequence
- Map pin drop
- Map route draw
- Shape fill sweep
- Shape stacking drop
Geometric & Swiss style
Geometric motion
- Geometric loop
- Lissajous figure trace
- Orbital pulse
- Rotating rings
- Spiral expansion draw
- Spirograph
- Zoom-through shape
Gradients & color
Hand-drawn & traditional
Icon animation
Isometric
Lines & strokes
- Bezier handle bend
- Line-to-polygon transform
- Marching ants
- Offset path expansion
- Path follow motion
- Pucker and bloat
- Ribbon sweep
- Speed lines
- Wiggle path
- Zig-zag distortion
Liquid & organic
Logo animation
Optical & interference
Polygon & tessellation
Repeaters & patterns
- Halftone dot scaling
- Hexagon tile reveal
- Line weave
- Linear repeater stagger
- Mograph grid flip
- Radial repeater
- Scale tile wave
- Spiral bloom
- Tessellation triangle flip
Shape morphing
- Blob-to-icon morph
- Shape assemble from fragments
- Shape boolean merge
- Squircle morph
- Superformula morph
- Tangram rearrangement
Sound-reactive
Waves & ripples
Particles & generative 122
Audio-reactive
Cellular automata
- Brian's Brain
- Conway's Game of Life
- Cyclic cellular automaton
- Falling sand
- Langton's ant
- Lenia
- Rule 110 automaton
- Rule 30 automaton
Electricity
Emitters
- Animated sprite particles
- Bokeh particles
- Bubbles
- Confetti
- Dust motes
- Embers
- Falling leaves
- Fireflies
- Fireworks
- Fountain
- Glitter pour
- Meteor shower
- Particle trail
- Path emitter
- Pollen drift
- Rainfall
- Smoke puffs
- Snowfall
- Sparks
Fire & plasma
Fluids
Forces
Fractals
- Barnsley fern
- Burning Ship fractal
- Dragon curve
- Hilbert curve
- Julia set morph
- Koch snowflake
- Mandelbrot zoom
- Mandelbulb raymarch
- Sierpinski gasket
Growth & L-systems
Interaction fields
Metaballs & blobs
Noise & fields
- Curl noise flow
- Domain warping
- Flow field
- Fractal Brownian motion
- Isolines contour animation
- Magnetic field lines
- Perlin noise field
- Streamlines
- Worley cellular noise
Particle text & images
Reaction & growth
Rigid bodies
Sand & granular
Soft bodies & cloth
Space
Strange attractors
- Clifford attractor
- De Jong attractor
- Hopalong attractor
- Lorenz attractor
- Rossler attractor
- Thomas attractor
Swarms & agents
- Ant colony pheromone trails
- Boids flocking
- Kuramoto synchronization
- Lotka-Volterra cycles
- Particle Life
- Physarum slime mold
- Predator avoidance flock
- Seek and arrive steering
- Social force crowd
- Wander steering
Terrain
Tiling & patterns
- Circle packing
- Maze carving
- Penrose tiling
- Recursive rectangle subdivision
- Truchet tiles
- Voronoi cells
- Voronoi relaxation
- Wave function collapse
Water & light
Camera, 3D & light 80
3D motion
- Bend deformer
- Beveled 3D text
- Card deck fan
- Cloner grid
- Displacement map
- Effector-driven instances
- Exploded view
- Extrusion
- Hologram effect
- Infinite perspective grid
- Isometric view
- Low-poly faceting
- Noise vertex wobble
- Point cloud reveal
- Sphere-to-grid morph
- Taper deformer
- Tesseract rotation
- Turntable rotation
- Twist deformer
- Voxel build
- Wave deformer
- Wireframe reveal
- X-ray view
Camera moves
- Crane shot
- Dolly in and out
- Drone flyover
- Dutch angle
- Fly-through
- Follow cam
- Handheld shake
- Hyperlapse
- Ken Burns effect
- Look-around
- Oner
- Optical zoom
- Orbit shot
- Pan
- Pedestal
- POV shot
- Push-in
- Tilt
- Tracking shot
- Truck
Depth
- 2.5D photo parallax
- Atmospheric fog
- Bokeh highlights
- Depth of field
- Depth slicing
- Layered fog bands
- Multiplane camera
- Parallax layers
- Rack focus
- Tilt-shift miniature
Lens
Lighting & surface
- Bloom
- Caustics
- Chromatic dispersion
- Chrome reflection
- Day-night cycle
- Glass refraction
- God rays
- Lens flare
- Light painting
- Lightning flash
- Rim light
- Shadow play
- Spotlight follow
- Subsurface scattering glow
- Thin-film iridescence
Shader looks
VFX & post 87
Blend & composite
Blur & focus
CRT & display
- CRT curvature
- CRT power-off collapse
- CRT scanlines
- Phosphor persistence
- Refresh bar
- Screen refresh flicker
Color & grading
- Bleach bypass
- Cross-processing
- Desaturation
- Duotone
- Faded print look
- LUT color grade
- Photographic negative
- Sepia tone
- Solarization
Dissolves
Distortion & displacement
Dithering & quantization
Editing & frame
Film & analog
Glitch
Glow & light
Keying & mattes
Lens effects
Motion & shutter
Painterly & sketch
Particle & weather overlays
Pixel & mosaic
Recursion & feedback
Retro digital
Rotoscope & outline
Symmetry & geometry
Thermal & sensor
Time displacement
VHS & tape
Water & atmosphere
Broadcast & data 111
Annotation
- Arrow pointer draw
- Callout line with label
- Dimension line annotation
- Focus blur-out
- Highlight circle draw
- Numbered hotspot pins
- Spotlight dim
- Strike-through draw
- Underline swash draw
- Zoom-to-detail magnifier
Bumpers & idents
Charts
- Area fill sweep
- Axis rescale
- Bar chart race
- Bar grow
- Box plot draw
- Bullet graph fill
- Candlestick build
- Chart type morph
- Chord diagram draw
- Force-directed network settle
- Funnel stage reveal
- Gantt bar build
- Gauge needle sweep
- Heatmap fill
- Hexbin density build
- Line chart draw-on
- Parallel coordinates draw
- Pictogram counting
- Pie sweep
- Polar area rose
- Radar chart fill
- Ridgeline ripple
- Sankey flow
- Scatter plot point appear
- Scatter time playback
- Series isolate highlight
- Slopegraph reveal
- Small multiples cascade
- Sorted bar reorder
- Sparkline draw
- Stacked bar build
- Streamgraph flow
- Sunburst build
- Timeline scroll
- Treemap re-layout
- Waffle chart fill
- Waterfall build
Comparisons
End cards
Explainers
Lower thirds
Maps
- Choropleth fill
- Dot density map
- Flight arc
- Flow map lines
- Globe spin
- Isochrone expansion
- Location ripple pulse
- Projection morph
- Zoom-to-location map
Process diagrams
- Cycle diagram rotation
- Decision tree branch growth
- Flowchart build
- Hub-and-spoke spread
- Milestone marker pop
- Org chart grow
- Pyramid build
- Quadrant matrix reveal
- Step-by-step process reveal
Social media
- Chat bubble sequence
- Comment pop-up stack
- Floating reaction emoji
- Poll result bar fill
- Quote card reveal
- Subscribe button press
Sports graphics
- Game clock countdown
- Leaderboard row swap
- Player movement trail
- Player stat card
- Score bug
- Team color wipe
- Virtual first-down line