Framer Tutorial: How to Create Stunning Interactive Prototypes
Take a look at the example prototypes below. These were done in Framer. After this tutorial, you will be able to start creating your own stunning animated prototypes in no time.
The Framer Prototyping
(Please note: This article was written with Framer Classic in mind, an interactive design tool for macOS that is being deprecated in favor of a “more powerful tool”—according to Framer folks— Framer X.)
The Framer prototyping tool used to be hard to master but useful as the most accurate and limitless prototyping software. Framer now comes with Design + Code + Collaborate features, meaning you can create your prototypes directly inside Framer, developing a fully functional prototype without any third-party software and without any coding skills.
This article will show you how to use simple Framer code (no prior knowledge of coding required). You will learn how to combine the best features from design and code mode in Framer to create interactive, animated prototypes. Let’s jump into this tutorial and grab some small code snippets to improve your prototypes.
Framer Basics
Let’s get started! Go to classic.framer.com and download a trial version. They are giving us all two weeks free of their fully functional app, which is enough time to learn a lot about this prototyping software.
After installation, you may want to go through some of the examples they provide and play with them a bit. When you are done, it’s time to start prototyping.
(In this Framer tutorial, I will be focusing on creating prototypes directly in Framer.js. You should also know there are other ways to start prototyping in Framer. For example, you can work directly with Sketch files. I will cover that workflow in another article.)
The All-new Framer — Design Mode
The newest version of Framer has a great new feature: design mode. It allows you to work almost the same way as you do in Sketch or Figma. You can create vector layers, import images, or create and style text layers. All of this becomes very handy when you want to prototype quickly without any third party apps.