Framer only com
She loves solving user problems. Every second Tuesday, we send a newsletter with useful techniques on front-end and UX. When it comes to showing the transition, interaction and animation of elements in the user interface, a prototyping tool like Framer X can make a difference in the way you communicate your vision to the team and stakeholders and as a result, boost your efficiency as a designer. With the following example, I will illustrate how you can add interaction to static designs. To profit the most from this tutorial, some basic experience with Framer X are welcome.
Using Framer
A little bit of history, Framer. Over the last couple of years, it gained adoption among designers comfortable with front-end development but it poses a steep learning curve for others. In addition, the new workflow opens up the possibility for tighter collaborations with engineers who already use the React library in production. Framer X comes with a set of transitions to help you prototype screen transitions directly in the design view. In the properties panel on the right, the link section allows you to attach a connection to another frame screen and set a basic transition such as push or overlay.
Most of the transition effects work as you would expect. The overlay and modal transition only allow you to choose the direction of the transition as well as the backdrop color and opacity.
Most prototypes include common interactions like scrolling. You also have to create a separate frame that contains all the content and then link it to the scroll area. This workflow may seem redundant as it adds additional frames to your canvas but it has itsadvantage of being a independent module for you to switch between different content frames with ease. Another handing tool available in the design editor is the page tool, which lets you create swipe carousel like pattern by just connecting multiple frames together.
This feature does more than just building a traditional carousel slider. Given that it enables a slide to reveal action, you can use it to prototype things like swipe row to delete or the iOS native dropdown picker for example.
The design editor has a similar prototyping workflow as other screen linking tools on the market such as Sketch , Invision and Marvel.
You can quickly create a click-through prototype with Framer X or a slightly more interactive prototype with the page and scroll area feature. That being said, if you are looking to create something that is a little more complex or has custom animation effects then you have to get your hands on the code editor or use the component store more on that later.
Code overrides may sound a bit foreign for designers. It can be as simple as changing the color of the background or as complicated as making a layer clickable and animates to different locations.
Code overrides are highly shareable and the workflow to apply an override involves coding an override in a separate editor and linking the code functions to your design frame via the property panel.
If you are looking to prototype animation based on certain user events then code override may be able to help. While code override is powerful, it has its limitations. The benefit of applying style with an override is that you can treat it as a style symbol that can be linked to multiple elements to ease the pain of future updates.
A more common use case for override is to create and apply an animation event to elements such as scaling the size of an element on tap. Given that the design editor only allows you to connect screens based on clicks, code override is another method to listen to user events and create animated responses. For the most part, you should be able to prototype a variety of animation effects with the code override feature. Therefore, if you need to attach animations to these user inputs then you have to go down the code component route.
You are likely familiar with how design component works within Framer because it operates as a design symbol in Sketch or other design tools. A design symbol can be re-used in different design files and there may be properties e. When created, code components work exactly the same way but the catch is that a code component is a React component and it has to be created separately with a code editor. Creating a Framer code component is basically writing code, which requires a certain level of proficiency with React.
The power of the code component is that it gives you flexibility to implement functionalities into your component with less limitations. Compared to the code override which has to connect to the design layer and therefore limited by its output, we control both the styling and behavior of the design from the code component. The beauty of the component is that it can be reused for other design project and by other people.
By allowing anyone to publish their components to the store, others can leverage these pre-built components, especially the coded component that may have embedded functionalities. One example is the YouTube player component, which renders a fully playable video player within your design prototype and all you have to do is to supply a YouTube link. There are other powerful components in the store and more are contributing to the store every day by other people.
Over time, this component ecosystem should allow designers to build highly interactive prototypes by dragging and dropping components. Sign in. Prototyping design animations with Framer X. Poyi Chen Follow.
Prototyping without coding. Applying custom animation with code overrides. Code components You are likely familiar with how design component works within Framer because it operates as a design symbol in Sketch or other design tools.
Why use code components Creating a Framer code component is basically writing code, which requires a certain level of proficiency with React. The component store. Thank you very much for reading this article. Feel free to reach out to me either by commenting or on Twitter if you have feedback or questions.
UX Collective Curated stories on user experience, visual, and product design. Career Coach. Productivity Nerd. UX Collective Follow.
We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. See responses 2. More From Medium. More from UX Collective. Elaine Tran in UX Collective. Danny Sapio in UX Collective.
Tess Gadd in UX Collective. Discover Medium. Make Medium yours. Become a member. About Help Legal.
Owners of frame shops and art galleries are our main target audience. Everybody is welcome to join. However, you might find this group useful if you are currently. Got creative ideas? Bring them to life with Framer X.
When I paste Artboards from Sketch some of the elements that come from Symbols or Libraries don't render well. Are there any preset rules about Pasteboard not being able to paste those types of elements correctly? Thank you for any help you can offer.
Framer is coming to the web. Design Prototyping Development.
A little bit of history, Framer. Over the last couple of years, it gained adoption among designers comfortable with front-end development but it poses a steep learning curve for others. In addition, the new workflow opens up the possibility for tighter collaborations with engineers who already use the React library in production.
Always interactive, lightning fast design.
The power of code meets the power of design. First things first. I have been lucky enough to get an invite and play around with this. Oh, and design system management is inbuilt in Framer X. The Design and Code tabs on top are gone in Framer X. It is basically divided into 4 sections on the left — Tools, Layers, Components and Store.
Framer X — Initial Impressions 🎸 🚀
While Framer X does bring together development and design in powerful ways, it remains primarily a design tool, optimized for design, rather than a tool for building production websites and applications. That said, you can bring in production components , create interactive protypes using real data , and put your projects on the web. Not directly. You could copy over your code, but would need to replace those components with regular HTML elements, or motion elements , if your components involved animations. See our guide on importing components for more. Design components are not stored as React components, so you cannot export them except as rendered images. The full documentation for Motion can be found on the Motion API page or go straight to the the quick start section to get started right away. However, code overrides are basically higher order components , so you may be able to reuse some of your code that way. Yes you can. Find out more on the Developer Handoff article.
