Why Choose Lottie Over Other Animation Formats

To understand why Lottie is taking over the animation market for web, android, and iOS, we must understand the competing animation formats’ strengths and weaknesses. From the ease of creating a Lottie animation to the accuracy of color, image quality, and size against its competitors.

Many developers and software engineers haven’t embraced Lottie because they’re used to conventional animation formats in their daily workflow. Some think all browsers and mobile devices don’t support Lotties, and others believe the implementation might be too complicated compared to something like a GIF file.

Implementing Lotties on web and mobile applications is a painless task with many bonuses for designers and software engineers alike. After a short learning period, Lotties allows designers to draw vector-based animations and engineers to tweak them at runtime, be it for color, shape change, animation speed, or removal of effects.

If there are no engineers to work on a smaller project, such as a WordPress blog, you can still make full use of Lotties to impress users and make them feel like they have a great experience. Sketro makes Lotties easy by allowing anyone to visualize, create and modify any valid Lottie JSON file with just a few clicks. You don’t even need a designer for this, as you can build your own design on Sketro and have it export a ready-to-use JSON. There’s also a marketplace for those not willing to hire an animator.

Lottie Animation vs. GIF

GIFs have been around since the early years of the internet. Now over 30 years old, the format is still widespread and supported by all devices. Making a GIF not autoplay is challenging, which is especially problematic for mobile users. It has its fair share of issues compared to Lottie files, for instance:

1 — GIFs continuously loop, so there’s no opportunity to pause it. This is especially problematic in applications with several GIF files playing at the same time per page.

2 — There’s a severe loss of quality and sharpness of animation. This issue is present even when converting from RAW files.

3 — They also don’t support any transparency, making them difficult to blend with the rest of an application

4 — When trying to achieve a manageable file size, FPS has a considerable impact. Low frame rates are required to reach manageable sizes, making the animation incredibly choppy.

5 — File size is usually five to ten times larger when compared to commercial formats such as mp4 videos. GIFs are larger than even the more sizable animated formats such as APNG files.

Meanwhile, Lotties have a tiny size in the Kilobyte range, supporting transparency to help them fit in any application and allow playback control, making pausing to save resources an option. Its vector-based nature ensures that animations are always high quality and scaled to any screen size.

Lottie Animation vs. APNG

PNG sequences have a similar issue to GIF files when it comes to size. They’re very large, and modifying them requires swapping out the entire sequence. They need several payloads to support all commercial resolutions.

Meanwhile, Lottie JSON files can output files that are up to 50 times smaller than the average PNG sequence, saving bandwidth on the server and mobile users’ data. The higher quality Lotties that can be made at Sketro ensure that the resources on a server are being used efficiently, increasing profits and faster page loads, helping increase returning users’ chances.

Lottie Animation vs. Video

Unless you’re shooting a video that needs real-life aspects, where vector-based animation won’t be enough, Lotties can significantly help the progress and make it much cheaper. Incredible videos and animations can be made using Lottie. Kurzgesagt is an outstanding example with their fully vector-based videos about all sorts of science and experiments.

You don’t need to be at the level of Kurzgesagt to make 30-second videos to pitch an idea, product, or subject. Our Lottie: Lightweight Animation article helps understand Lottie animation’s marketplace a little better and helps make something that will catch customers’ eyes.

Shooting live videos can become very expensive, between the crew, equipment, renting a location, production, editing, actors, and many other factors. When compared to hiring a designer or animator and making a short video for the same purpose, Lotties become much cheaper, deliver quality, and stunning visuals that helps keep the user interested in what’s being presented.

Conclusion

When trying to make the most out of resources, be it money, bandwidth, or disk space, the common commercial animation formats fail to deliver quality. As long as life-like features aren’t needed, Lottie vectors provide a quick and easy solution to many issues when trying to improve an application before it can get in the users’ hands.

Lottie ensures that designers and software engineers can work in harmony. Tweaking Lotties is as simple as loading the Lottie JSON file on https://app.sketro.co/, finding what needs to be changed, and with a few clicks, have the modifications ready to go.