I think Figma Motion is going to bring back the Flash designer.
I was one. In school I used to go to the computer lab and build a website about the solar system in Flash. Later I made loads of Flash banner ads and websites, and I was still working in Flash when everyone switched to HTML5.
I don’t mean the plugin. That’s dead and it should stay dead. I mean the designer Flash used to produce. Someone who drew the thing, animated it, and wrote the ActionScript that made it react when you clicked. They didn’t hand a static layout to someone else and hope for the best.
Flash had plenty of problems. But it gave a generation of designers one place to make websites, games and weird little experiments that felt alive. If you could jump between drawing, timing and logic, Flash rewarded you for it. When it died, I watched those skills get split across different jobs and different tools.
Figma Motion won’t bring Flash back. It could bring back some of that way of working, inside the tool product teams already open every morning.
Figma didn’t invent animation.
Rive exists. Lottie exists. After Effects exists. Anyone willing to write CSS or JavaScript could always animate an interface.
What’s new is where it lives. Product teams spend their whole day in Figma. There’s always a more powerful tool than the one everyone uses, but the one everyone uses usually wins. When motion sits next to your components, variables, comments and Dev Mode, a specialist no longer adds it at the end. It becomes part of the design.
Figma Motion launched at Config 2026 as a timeline on the canvas. You can keyframe layers, tweak timing, use easing curves and springs, build animated components and save motion variables. Reviewers can leave a comment at a specific moment in the animation. Developers get a Motion tab in Dev Mode and can copy the code as CSS, JSON, React or motion.dev, or pass the motion details to a coding agent through MCP.
So Figma wants motion handled like colour or spacing, as part of the design system. That matters more than the timeline itself.
AI makes this more interesting.
Motion design is hard to learn. You can describe a nice loading state in one sentence. Getting it to feel right takes taste and a hundred tiny changes to timing.
The Figma agent can now do the first pass. You type a prompt, it puts real keyframes on the timeline, and you adjust from there.
That’s going to produce a lot of bad motion. A lot.
It’ll also teach people. Designers who’d never open After Effects will start to get easing. Designers who’d never write animation code will start to notice why a transition feels cheap. More people get in at the bottom, and the ones with taste will go further than they could before.
Rive and Lottie aren’t going anywhere.
Rive is still better when the animation is tied to how the product behaves. Its state machines hook animation up to logic, inputs and runtime states. If you’re building game-like UI, or interactive components that ship inside the product, Rive is the right tool.
Lottie is small, After Effects people already know it, and it plays almost everywhere on web and app. LottieFiles keeps pushing it too, with Lottie Creator, state machines, AI keyframes and dotLottie. Figma even says Lottie export is coming to Motion.
What changes is where you start. For a button interaction, a screen transition, a loading state or a motion rule in the design system, I’d now start in Figma. The animation is attached to the component, the developer can inspect it, the agent can draft it, and the feedback happens in the same file.
The hard part is still ahead.
Exporting one animation is the easy bit. What I want is to hand over a whole experience. Multiple scenes, real product states and real data. Responsive layouts, conditional interactions, shaders, 3D. Motion that changes because the user or the content changed.
Figma is heading there. Config 2026 also brought shader effects and fills, code layers, a more capable agent, more MCP integrations and 3D transforms. But it’s patchy right now. Shaders don’t show up in Dev Mode yet. Code layers are still in closed beta. Nobody is building a production interaction engine in Figma yet.
So I’m less interested in whether Figma beats Rive or Lottie. I’m interested in the designers these tools produce.
Figma Motion won’t turn everyone into a motion designer. It will make motion harder to ignore. And the designers who lean into it get back something that’s been missing since Flash, where the design, the animation and the code all happen in one head.
That’s the new Flash designer. Someone who can design the thing, animate it, understand the system around it, and still make it feel good.