Designs and front-end journal of Stéphane Changarnier.

UI Prototypes with Protopie

05/18/2021

Context & web animations

I'm still on the design side these days, even if I keep up developing using React at the same time, but not that easy. Though, the good part of this, is that UI design is very complementary with web development, and mastering a wider part of the production chain is very interesting.

As a front-end developer, I have to deal with web animations & interactions on a regular basis. Most of the time, I get by ok just using css rules or @keyframes.

Recently, I discovered Framer motion that suddenly opened new doors. For complex animations, such as illustration popovers, After Effect + Lottie integrations have become my go-to solution. But until now, I never jumped into the prototyping tools wagon.

Having used Framer motion, the most obvious one was Framer, but one of my fellow already used Protopie which I previously never heard of.

Protopie

To quickly summarize, it's a prototyping software that can be connected with Sketch (but also Figma and Adobe XD) through the provided plugin, and allow us to bring any kind of advanced interactions/animations from our Sketch artboards for demo purpose.

So it encompasses a dedicated desktop application to build prototype, but also a Cloud to host and share our prototype to others. The app has a built-in previewer to run our Prototype, and the overall interface is very neat.

Protopie is built with simplicity in mind, around logical concepts that make sense (trigger type binded to object in the layer panel, with responses nested as actions). It's mostly a no-code tool, but we might use a formula system for advanced use-case that take advantage of variables.