Modern Skill Stack is a podcast by Uxcel CEO Gene Kamenez. Real stories on how digital product professionals are keeping up with a constantly changing skills landscape.
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Twenty years ago, motion in digital products meant Flash animations and hand-stitched GIFs. Then the industry moved on. For a long stretch, motion became the thing you added if the timeline hadn’t already eaten your budget, a nice-to-have that rarely survived a sprint review. Jaime Creixems thinks we’re about to correct that. He’s a Motion Design Strategist at LottieFiles with two decades across development, UX, and product leadership, and his argument is straightforward: AI is giving designers back time, and the smartest place to put it is motion. Not as decor, but as a strategic design tool.
Jaime has a framework for why now is the right moment, a practical learning path for designers who’ve been putting this off, and a live demo that made me want to open Figma the second we finished recording.
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You’ll learn:
Why motion is becoming a core product design skill in 2026, and why AI is the reason now is the right time
How to go from zero motion experience to shipping a real Lottie animation using only Figma and the LottieFiles plugin
What motion design systems are, how top companies are building them, and what tokens, presets, and easing parameters actually mean in practice
How state machines make animations interactive, and how AI builds them for you from a plain-language prompt
Why you should still learn the foundations even when AI can do the heavy lifting, and how one bad prompt can leave you completely stuck
A live look at LottieFiles Creator’s physics simulator, motion tokens, and real-time text support
Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:29 Why motion design now
05:51 Benefits of a diverse career journey
10:20 The future of motion design and AI
13:47 Integrating motion in product roles
15:59 Tools and techniques for learning motion design
23:39 Motion design systems and brand identity
29:34 Practical demo of Lottie plugin in Figma
33:38 Creating interactive elements with state machines
38:25 Exploring motion tokens and their application
43:21 Innovative features in animation creation
47:32 Outro
My biggest takeaways
Motion adds the dimension of time, and that changes everything
There’s a familiar argument running through the industry right now: will AI replace designers, or is it a tool we use? Jaime lands firmly on the second side, but adds a layer most people skip. The question isn’t just whether AI is a threat or an asset. It’s what you do with the capacity AI gives back to you.
His answer: you go deeper.
For Jaime, going deeper means adding a new dimension to the work. Static design, even very good static design, operates in 2D. Motion adds time. It gives a product personality, makes it feel alive and communicates intent through the way things move rather than just where they sit. Luxury brands do this instinctively: slow, deliberate transitions signal confidence. Consumer apps lean into bouncy micro-interactions that say playful. These aren’t aesthetic choices layered onto a finished product. They’re brand decisions made through motion.
In Jaime’s words:
“As designers, we need to adapt to the times. The big debate in the design industry: will AI take our jobs? I come down firmly on the side of: it’s a tool we can use, and it’s going to enable us to do so much more. Now that we have AI to bounce ideas and create concepts, designers have more time to develop more skills and take design to the next level. To me, that next step is adding the extra dimension of time, motion, making our designs have personality, pop out, and create a lively experience for our users.”
What I find interesting about this framing is where the pressure actually originates. Jaime isn’t saying motion matters because users are demanding it. He’s saying the competitive bar is rising across the board, and when AI helps every team ship faster and at higher quality, the differentiator shifts toward the things AI doesn’t do as well on its own: the emotional layer, the delight, the personality. Motion is exactly that layer.
Motion design is moving into design systems, and teams are starting now
One of the more concrete things Jaime tracks at LottieFiles is where motion sits in company design systems. The answer, increasingly, is that it has a dedicated slot. And this isn’t just big tech. He’s watching it happen across financial services, retail, and startups, companies that a few years ago wouldn’t have had a motion conversation at all.
The shift changes the nature of the work. When motion lives outside the system, it’s decoration applied ad hoc by whoever happens to care about it that sprint. When it’s part of the system, it becomes a defined set of decisions: how fast things move, whether they ease in or out, whether the overall feel is bouncy or restrained or expressive. Those decisions need to be documented, consistent, and reusable, the same way color tokens or type scales are.
Here is how Jaime describes the shift:
“I meet with companies every day, from small to big, every industry from financial to retail to tech, snd what I’m seeing across the board is that motion now has a spot in the design system. Design systems are about tokens: spacing, typography, colors, layout rules. But nothing was thought of for motion beforehand. Now there’s real interest in: motion is part of our brand. We need to define acceleration, easing in and out parameters, motion presets making sure any animation sticks to a particular set of rules. Things are bouncy, or things are very solid, or very soft and smooth. It depends on the brand.”
LottieFiles released motion tokens, a way to connect existing design system tokens to animation parameters, just a week prior to this recording. Jaime noted there’s still a lot to build out before the full picture is there, but the direction is clear: motion is becoming a first-class token type, not an afterthought. If you’re building or auditing a design system right now, it’s worth asking whether motion has a seat at the table yet.
The Figma → Lottie workflow is an easy way to start with motion
Many designers avoid motion because the tools can feel intimidating. Jaime’s solution is simple: use Figma and the LottieFiles plugin to turn a prototype into a Lottie animation. No After Effects. No coding.
In Jaime’s words:
“This was the most transforming thing I learned about Lottie: LottieFiles has a Figma plugin. If you’re a UI/UX designer with no idea of motion, scared of learning it because there’s a lot of complexity, you can create a prototype in Figma with Smart Animate, create your keyframes as a prototype, and export it as a Lottie with the plugin. That basically turns you from a UI/UX designer into a basic motion designer. It gets you there. And I think that’s so empowering.”
The live demo walks through exactly this: Jaime starts with a button in Figma, builds hover and click states with Smart Animate, exports via the plugin, and ends up with a production-ready interactive animation embedded in an HTML page. Under 15 minutes. Vector-based, 60fps, a fraction of the size of an equivalent GIF or video.
For designers who want to go further, or who come from an illustration background, Jaime also walks through LottieFiles Creator, the company’s browser-based animation tool. Think of it as a modern alternative to After Effects, with AI built in where it matters most.
State machines make animation interactive, and AI builds them from a prompt
The demo section is worth watching rather than reading about. But here’s the shape of it.
Jaime takes the button animation he built in Figma and turns it into a interactive element: one that responds to hover, click, and idle states. The mechanism is a state machine, a way of defining which animation plays in response to which input. Idle loops. Hover triggers when the pointer enters. Click fires on click, then returns to idle.
Conceptually simple. But building one manually, dragging states, defining inputs, connecting transitions, takes time and precision. During the demo, Jaime skips it entirely.
In Jaime’s words, describing the live demo:
“I could manually drag states in and create every input, but who has time? So I let my AI assistant do it. [...] It plays idle, loops continuously, then goes to hover, then loops continuously, then goes to click. It created all the inputs: hover as a Boolean, the click event as a trigger. I had to do nothing to get this working. That’s how powerful it is, because now that animation is interactive.”
What makes this notable isn’t just the time saved. The output was a proper state machine with Boolean inputs, event triggers, and looping logic, built from a plain-language description. Jaime gave a fair warning before running it: “AI is AI, and it does a thing.” But it worked. Hover played. Click fired and returned to idle. The whole interaction embedded into a page with a copy-paste of the generated HTML.
The larger point is what interactivity opens up. Motion tokens let you connect a Lottie animation to real data, a star rating that animates as a user selects it, a battery indicator that syncs with an actual charging value, a birthday card that shows the right number of candles. Not prototypes. Production-ready interactive components.
Learn the foundations because AI works best when you speak the language
This is the counterweight to everything else in the conversation.
Jaime is excited about AI as an accelerant. But he’s equally clear that it has a ceiling and that ceiling is set by the person using it. At one point I described trying to use an AI music generation tool and hitting a wall the moment I needed to give feedback. I could generate something. But I didn’t have enough vocabulary to tell the tool what was wrong with it. I got stuck at 80%. Jaime’s point is that this same dynamic plays out with motion, with code, with design, in any domain where you’ve outsourced the generation without building the language to guide it.
In Jaime’s words:
“Take the time to learn a little bit about how CSS works, what a JSON file is, how JavaScript works, what HTML is and how you’d build a basic layout. You might say: AI can take care of this for me. But you don’t want AI to become a black box where you just throw stuff in and it gives you stuff back. You want to understand what it gave you back. Can you read it? Can you understand what’s going on? You don’t have to write the code yourself, but can you understand what happened? Because the better those foundations are, the better results you’re going to get. It’s transformative when you can tell an AI precisely with detail what’s going wrong and how you want it fixed.”
With motion specifically: if you don’t know what a keyframe is, what easing means, or what separates ease-in from ease-out, you’ll eventually face an animation that’s 80% right and have no way to describe what’s missing. The foundations don’t replace AI. They make your prompts precise enough to close the gap.
A note from Gene
Motion has been on my mind for a long time at Uxcel. We’ve added animated illustrations and small motion elements to the product over the years, and every time we do, the response is positive. Something about a thing that moves (even subtly) makes a product feel more alive. I haven’t totally figured out why that effect is so consistent, but it is.
What Jaime showed me is that the gap between “I’d love to add motion” and “we actually ship motion” is smaller than I assumed. The Figma plugin alone closes most of it for a working UI/UX designer. The state machine demo closed the rest.
If you want to go deeper on the skills that make this possible, including motion fundamentals, design systems, the role of AI in modern product work, you can learn that in self-paced, interactive courses at Uxcel.
And if you want to see the full demo in action, watch the episode on YouTube.
Resources and tools mentioned
LottieFiles:
LottieFiles platform (workspace, Creator tool, Figma plugin)
LottieFiles CodePen demos — state machines, motion tokens, interactive animations
Tools mentioned:
LottieFiles Figma plugin — export Figma prototypes as Lottie animations directly
LottieFiles Creator — browser-based animation tool with AI assistance, physics simulator, and state machine builder
Figma Smart Animate — Figma’s built-in motion feature used in the Figma → Lottie workflow
After Effects + Bodymovin plugin — traditional pipeline for Lottie creation, still widely used
Formats and standards mentioned:
Lottie JSON — open-source vector-based animation format (lightweight alternative to GIF/video)
.lottie — LottieFiles’ compressed file format (up to 10× smaller than Lottie JSON)
Where to find Jaime Creixems
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/creixems/
LottieFiles: lottiefiles.com
Upcoming Uxcel × LottieFiles workshop: https://luma.com/uxcel
Production and marketing by Uxcel. Interested in appearing on the Modern Skill Stack podcast? Reach out at partnerships@uxcel.com
Has motion design come up in your team’s conversations recently? Or does it still feel like “nice to have”? Drop a comment below and let’s talk.
Cheers,
Gene
