Product Spotlight: Jitter

Anyone Can Make Motion

Mar 8, 2022

There is this nostalgia I get whenever I discover a product that helps me solve a problem but enables me to hone a skill I own at a foundational level.

That’s what happened when I discovered Canva, I really did great things with Canva and I still do but no other product has made me feel that way for a while now.

One product has actually ignited a spark,

Before revealing what has me writing like a boy in love (cause I am), let’s get to what the problem is.

You see, I use products for fun and I try to learn the basics of different things just for the fun of it. One thing I have been trying to learn for a very long time is motion design and I don't want to create cartoons, I just wanted to make fancy simple stuff for my business and hobbies. The best tool out there for that is After Effects but the problem with After Effects is that if you don't stay with it, you might lose grasp of the entire interface along with the fact that it is quite pricey, needs to be downloaded and it is heavy on low memory computers.

For about 2years, I have been looking for an alternative to aftereffects. I eventually gave up my dreams of motion design and went on to learn product design with Adobe XD and one thing I loved about Adobe was how easy it was to move screen animations to Aftereffects and go wild on animations but as the world would have it, Aftereffects was still difficult for me to grasp.

I eventually moved to Figma but found no integration to supercharge animation like the one AdobeXD and After Effects had.

After leaving product design to double down on product management.

Keep in mind that all this happened in 2020 but in February 2022, I discovered something amazing.

I needed to make creative content marketing material for my Business: KoinsandKash. I wanted it to be like a GIF and I wanted a component of our app to show, I had searched for some time and found some tools to use but they weren’t giving me the glossy refined feel I was looking for. Fast forward to February 2022. I discovered Jitter on Product Hunt and I went to straight to YouTube and found out that it was super easy to use.

Jitter

Jitter is a web-based motion design tool and it is great for adding animations to videos or designs.

Jitter has a free version where you can create and export 480p and 720p videos with the Jitter logo showing at the bottom right of the video you create.
What is also great about it is that they did not make the logo on the free version as intrusive as it usually is on other creator tools. The best thing about it is that costs about $18/month.

I feel like $18 is a great deal for all that value.

Jitter was set up about 2 years ago(in 2020) and I am just sad that I did not discover the tool since then. I was literally looking for that kind of tool in 2020.

The Things I Love About Jitter:

I really cannot break down all the aspects of Jitter that I love but here are some that blow my mind.

Short Tutorial Videos:
You see most design tools and creator tools have a learning curve even when they claim they are easy to learn.
Jitter promised that it would be easy to learn and I have not seen a single tutorial video on there that is more than 5:22 minutes, they just want us to jump straight into Jitter after watching a video for 2 minutes. It is genius!
Remixed Templates:

Another interesting thing about Jitter is that you don’t have to start from scratch, you can simply duplicate any template you find and make it to suit your needs.
Pres-set Animations:
Another wonderful thing about Jitter is the preset animations on Jitter, you get a bunch of pre-set animations and one of the amazing things is that you get a preview of how every animation works making it easy to make a choice about which one you want.

Jump To Use Cases:

Showcase Product Designs: If you are a designer or a front end developer, you can use jitter to spotlight key features as a gif. This would help you communicate value propositions
Logo Animations: If you are a founder who wants to add some elegance to your logo, you can simply take it to Jitter as a PNG or SVG and play around with some of the preset animations.
Content Marketing: If you are a content marketer and you want to stop relying on clickbait headlines to drive engagement, then you should definitely try out jitter. Also if you have meaning to ship more video content
Feature Launches: Companies now leverage motion designs to launch features or products but they usually have motion designers on the team. There is no reason why the growth team cannot use Jitter to animate the feature and use it as a GIF to launch products.
Up your presentation game: With Jitter, you can add animate slides and add them to your presentation. Combine animated elements with a great pitch and you are definitely winning.

If I Worked At Jitter:

So normally when I write about things I’d like to see in a product, I don’t usually use the heading above but I would really like to implement the things I recommend here.

A Creator Program: It would be great to have a creator program where people can create and post templates on Jitter, the way you can post your designs on Figma’s community. It would also be great for there to be a learning track for people to identify as Jitter creators, things like badges which people can use to prove that they are jitter creators.
Multiple Artboards: It would be great to add more artboards and make more extensive videos on Jitter.
Music: This may be as an added pro feature when multiple artboards are added but it would also be nice to have upload audio (recordings or music files) to designs and it would also be great to have preset videos.

Conclusion:

There is a lot to do with Jitter and that’s because animations have a way of grabbing people’s attention which is something that is hard to do with all the content flying around. Jitter gives you the chance to combine ease and quality in your product.

You can up your GIF game and even your content game by just using Jitter.

I plan to use Jitter to showcase my case studies, product management case studies are not at glossy as that of designers or developers but I am sure I could put something together with Jitter and I will.

Iterate