✨ MAGIC ✨ Motion—that was the early name for the Layout Animation API. And honestly? It describes layout animations perfectly!

With layout animations, you simply tell Motion the starting and ending states of your animation, and Motion magically takes care of the rest.

If you’ve seen any cool Motion examples online, there’s a good chance that 95% of what impressed you was thanks to layout animations.

In this module, we’ll dive into how to harness this powerful feature to create our own magic. It won’t be all smooth sailing though; we’ll also explore some quirks along the way.

Form submit animation

We’ll kick things off by animating a submit button when the user submits a form. It’s the kind of animation you might still manage with CSS, but we’ll see how layout animations make it much easier — and more performant too!

Record player

Next, we’ll level up by animating a record player component. We’ll use layout animations to change the flex direction and resize the component, which you can not do with just CSS.

This is where you’ll start to see how layout animations not only save time but also make your code cleaner and more readable.

Expanding navigation

By combining layout animations with AnimatePresence, we’ll create a navigation component that animates its items while dynamically adjusting the wrapper’s size. Beautiful! 🧑‍🍳💋

Shared layout animations

When you think you can build literally anything with layout animations, we’re going to add shared layout animations to the mix. A powerful feature that lets you transition between components on a page smoothly. For example, we’ll use this to animate an active indicator in the navigation.

Music Player

To wrap up, we’ll build a music player component. In this component, we’ll combine all the concepts we’ve learned to create a complex animation where a single item morphs into a full-screen detail view.

Time to learn how layout animations can spice up your animations even more!