We’re excited to announce that Framer has acquired Popmotion, a popular collection of open-source JavaScript motion libraries. Popmotion founder, Matt Perry, also joins the Framer product team to help further the company’s mission to make it easy for anyone to create production-ready animations.

Popmotion finds a home

Back in 2014, Matt began working on a set of powerful JavaScript motion libraries, aided in part by the open source community. Over time, Popmotion’s use of physics, input tracking and timelines gained a steady following amongst web animation designers and React developers, even finding its way into the Facebook Oculus Go app. Today, Matt is excited to take Popmotion to the next level.

“I’ve always been fascinated with the different ways to blend user input with physics-based animations to bring UIs to life. Until now, I’ve been making those interactions purely in code, long after the design process ended,” says Matt. But that all changed when he received his Framer X beta invite in September 2018. Within minutes, Matt had Pose animations working inside a Framer prototype.

“ As I realized the implications, my brain sort of melted with the endless possibilities. So when the Framer team approached me, it wasn't hard to see that the only thing cooler than publishing Popmotion components to the Store would be to integrate it into the app itself, ” Matt

Framer X and beyond

As a Senior Product Engineer at Framer, Matt will work on integrating Popmotion’s production-ready libraries directly into Framer X. This will allow anyone to design rich interactions at the very start of the process, and to do so using simple but powerful animation controls.

Koen Bok, one of the founders of Framer, shares: ”Popmotion is one of the best animation frameworks for React and provides an excellent foundation to bring Framer closer to production. What Matt has created aligns perfectly with our vision for what the future of animation looks like in Framer X.”

Framer X users can expect to see the Popmotion effect in Framer X soon. Ultimately, this partnership will enable the team to deliver an easier interface design experience for designers, which also translates into production-ready output for developers. In spite of the acquisition, Popmotion’s avid fans need not worry. Matt and the Framer team will continue to support its open source libraries, including Pose, a simple, CSS-like animation library based on React, and Popmotion Pure, an advanced functional animation library for any JavaScript environment. And that’s not all—both Framer X users and React developers can expect even more ambitious open source projects to bubble up from this partnership.

On design tools of the future

Having seen the design space evolve greatly over the last few years, Matt is pretty clear on where tools are heading. In his mind, the next logical step is for product teams to use a tool like Framer X for the full development cycle, from ideation and prototyping, to deployment.

“Much like Unity, it’ll be possible to make a website or app without ever touching code (though many of us still will). In the near future, if developers want to override our automatic animation generation, they should be able to implement their own. That way, you can define a global look and feel for your app or website simply by tweaking one set of settings. Or hire your favorite animator to design the feel of your website, the way people hire branding agencies to design logos.”

If you’re interested in learning more about animation design, Popmotion and Framer X, sign up up for our newsletter. Or reach out directly to Matt on Twitter.