Motion Design Tools - April 2026 Roland Kahlenberg April 21, 2026
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Within 2 days, Maxon and Canva announced pro-level motion design apps - Autograph and Cavalry, respectively.
Note: Autograph is free only for individuals.
Let's first define motion design. Motion design is the use of design, including typography, compositing, and keyframing techniques on traditional media or digital assets to create positive, emotive brand experiences for viewers.
There are lots of questions about how Maxon's and Canva's introductions affect After Effects, the de facto application for motion design for decades - except in the area of motion graphics design systems, where Cavalry has done a stellar job of promoting its features as a practical solution to the world.
At the same time, the After Effects team has largely promoted glorified buttons - a single word or a few words encapsulated by a responsive graphic element that automatically resizes to fit text and visual content based on their sizes. This is a basic feature known as responsive design in the motion design world.
It's a basic feature found in design-based SaaS tools such as Canva and Adobe Express, and in no way warrants pro-level stature.
Autograph is a lot like After Effects - a lot. It has a very similar UI, along with a modern UI and animation engine. Autograph has added lots of procedural features, but it's still early days, so we await what its users put out in the coming months. Its reel looks exceptional and brings back memories of the annual After Effects reel that was put out ages ago.
After Effects was developed as a compositing application. Motion design or motion graphics as we know it today didn't exist back then. As motion design grew in popularity due to its efficacy as a storytelling genre and design feature for moving imagery, the After Effects team added motion design features, and users lapped them up.
Cavalry was designed as a motion graphics tool. Its engine seems to be pixel-based and set up such that each pixel can be controlled programmatically as part of a design system. This has allowed its developers to add lots of motion design-based sub-systems - oscillators, cloners, distributors, etc. - and have all of these working as a harmonious system. Cavalry's underlying engine allows it to leverage procedural animation - a way to animate elements, layers, or properties without having to keyframe each one individually.
So, with Cavalry, you can animate hundreds and even thousands of elements in an efficient manner. However, this approach creates difficulty when reaching out to individual layers or sets of layers for specific alterations.
Cavalry's default UI displays a timeline-based paradigm, but its mechanics do not lend themselves well to a traditional timeline, which users usually associate with a layer-based workflow. There is a node-based view, but again, its default is a timeline and layer-based paradigm where you do not view elements simply as layers. Instead, each layer encapsulates elements or behaviors - a distributor, oscillator, stagger, etc.
To view awesome work created with Cavalry, take a look at Mario De Meyer's pieces here.
While this is great for efficiently controlling lots of layers and keyframes, the paradigm becomes problematic when you want a specific layer or sets of layers to behave differently. This is where After Effects' layer-based paradigm comes to the fore. However, After Effects does not have robust procedural features or tools, even though its latest beta version includes Proportional Scrubbing. It is a minimalist approach compared to what Cavalry provides to professional motion graphics artists.
Proportional Scrubbing allows for procedural deployment of properties based on the selection order of keyframes. Also recently added was Quick Offset, which allows for staggering of layers based on selection order.
Professionals require a lot more, and Cavalry does an excellent job in this area when it comes to creating procedural motion graphics animations.
Not to be outdone, yours truly recently released an After Effects script called Keyframe Orchestrator which, as its name implies, provides keyframe orchestration within After Effects. It is a programmatic approach to animating property keyframes that solves a decades-old problem with timeline- and layer-based applications.
Keyframe Orchestrator provides efficient and effective control over property keyframes across hundreds of layers while allowing distribution values and timing values to be based on timeline and layer attributes such as Opacity, Gradient, Scale, X Position, Y Position, etc. This opens up lots of creative options for After Effects users. Take a look here at a few samples:
Working in Adobe After Effects Takes Time
Samples of Layer Distributor (Procedural Property Value Mapper)
Most of these animations were created with Keyframe Orchestrator and Layer Distributor (yet to be released). Layer Distributor includes Property Mapper, a procedural value-based add-on that helps users apply values procedurally across hundreds of layers based on timeline and layer attributes - much like Keyframe Orchestrator.
So, if you want to produce exciting VFX, Autograph, with its no-cost entry point, is a good starting point. If you're already using After Effects, you'd probably want to take a deeper look at its 3D features, which is an area After Effects has not delivered on yet even after a very long time in development. Its 3D engine still does not provide ray tracing, reflections, or refractions - all of which were supported in the Ray-Traced Render Engine it introduced over a decade ago but later discontinued.
After Effects has serious issues with its 3D engine, and its roadmap and vision for development and its users remain opaque. Smaller motion graphics appl
