Anima 5 Brings Fully Functional Material Design Into Your Design Tool

Anima, the design-to-code platform, announced today the launch of Anima 5 to provide Google’s Material Design users the freedom to create fully responsive prototypes in their preferred design tool, that behave just like the final product and automatically hand them off as developer-friendly code.

Founded in 2017 by developers and designers striving to improve collaboration between the two groups, Anima is a global design-to-code platform with offices in Tel Aviv and New York, and team members all around the world.

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With Google’s Material Design library becoming an increasingly popular choice, more and more product designers use Material Design component mockups in their design prototypes. But with the limited functionality of mockups, designers’ creativity often gets lost in translation in the handoff of static prototypes to the developers. Even with modern tools, designers still plan and design mockups that leave too much to the imagination, and require back-and-forth explaining.

Following Anima 4, which enabled designs to be turned into React code that developers can quickly build on, Anima 5 enables designers to create more realistic prototypes with truly functioning Material Design components from Google’s open-source library. Using their design tool, designers can now incorporate an interactive component from Material Design into their prototype and preview exactly how that component will feel and interact with the user, with no coding necessary.

“Google’s Material Design library has become a popular tool used heavily by product designers and developers. However, designers could only include Material Design components in their prototypes as image-based mockups.” said Avishay Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Anima. “Anima 5 is the first tool that enables designers to add fully interactive and responsive Material Design components in their prototypes, directly in their design tool.”

Anima 5 also enables interactive effects to be added to design prototypes, such as Parallax, hover effects, entrance animations, GIFs, Lottie and more. “As a designer, I strive to create stunning and visually pleasing designs, but some elements can’t be portrayed through static prototypes without leaving my design tool,” said Michal Cohen, CPO and co-founder at Anima. “Having the prototype react to scrolling, or a hover effect on a button directly in Figma means that I can finally express how my design comes  together, without having to hand  it off to the developer.”

“Anima 5 is a game-changer for the many thousands of teams that build products using Material Design,” said Or Arbel, CTO and co-founder of Anima. Or added, “It bridges communication gaps between designers and developers by allowing designers to create a working version of the final product without writing any code.”

Bootstrapped until 2020, Anima is backed by Y-Combinator and has recently raised $10 million in a Series A round. There are already over half a million Anima users including designers from Google, Netflix, Disney, Facebook and Amazon, with 30,000 additional designers and developers joining each month.

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Currently, Anima lets designers move from screen-based designs to fully responsive prototypes that actively demonstrate a true representation of the user interface, right in the tools they already use like Figma, Sketch or Adobe XD. Anima translates the designs to developer-friendly code that empowers engineers to cut through the grunt work and focus on product problem-solving and front-end architecture.

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