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I am an iOS mobile app developer, and I am looking to hire someone to create an animated illustration similar to this image hosted on Dribble. My question is, what file type(s) will the graphic designer supply me with? I'm trying to plan out how I will actually embed the animation into my app. Will it be some sort of video file type like a .gif? Does it depend on the animation software they use?

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  • I've recently learned that animations often come in JSON Lottie Files which are very lightweight and can be rendered at run-time. Does this seem to be the common file format nowadays for mobile animations?
    – Eric33187
    Feb 27, 2021 at 23:37
  • Having a motion designer use Lottie to export the animation into something usable by you is probably the best bet. Related: What's the best way to animate an illustration for the web?.
    – Zach Saucier
    Nov 23, 2021 at 14:03

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Take a look at this: Creating high quality animated backgrounds from Illustrator files

The files supplied should be the ones you need, and do not depend only on the software used, but how the designer uses it.

The most reasonable option is to generate an image sequence, probably PNG if you need transparency.

Then you could use it let's say as a CSS animation, or simply be saved as an mp4 file for example. If an animated gif is ok, it should have flat colors.

But you need to define what do you need. The animation you are showing could be done in JavaScript so the only need you need from the graphic designer is the chips, and the animation itself be done by scripting, which could be your work because scripting animation is beyond most graphic designers.

The assets could also be the chips on PNG and an SVG of the path of the circuit, so you could add SVG animations to the path. Or all the chips as vectors in SVG format.

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  • FWIW, the example shown probably doesn't need to be an image sequence. It could very likely all be SVG. If an SVG doesn't perform well, a video would be next best but only works with solid backgrounds. Worst case use a PNG image sequence.
    – Zach Saucier
    Nov 23, 2021 at 14:05

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