Adobe Animate

Definition

Adobe Animate is an animation application for creating vector-based animations, interactive content, and multimedia for web, broadcast, and mobile platforms, and the successor to Adobe Flash Professional.

Overview

Animate's roots trace back to Adobe Flash Professional, the authoring tool behind the once-dominant Flash animation format used across early web games, banner ads, and cartoons. As the web moved away from Flash toward open standards, Adobe rebranded and evolved the tool into Animate, shifting its primary export targets to formats like HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, and standard video, while keeping the frame-by-frame and tweened animation workflow that made Flash-era tools popular with animators. Animate supports both vector and bitmap artwork, a timeline-and-layers workflow familiar to traditional animators, and bone-based rigging for character animation, letting artists animate characters and interactive elements without hand-drawing every frame. It integrates with other Creative Cloud applications, letting artists bring in assets from Adobe Illustrator or hand off finished sequences to Adobe After Effects for further compositing. Today Animate is used mainly for 2D cartoon-style animation, educational and children's content, interactive banner ads, and simple games, occupying a more specialized niche within Adobe's Creative Cloud lineup than it did during the Flash era, when its output format was effectively a web standard in its own right.

Key Features

• Vector and bitmap animation on a timeline-and-layers workflow
• Bone-based rigging for character animation
• Export to HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, and standard video formats
• Frame-by-frame and tween-based animation tools
• Integration with Illustrator and After Effects for asset handoff
• Interactive content authoring for simple games and banner ads

Use Cases

History

Adobe Animate is a multimedia authoring and 2D animation application. It originated as FutureSplash Animator in 1996; when Macromedia acquired FutureWave in December 1996 it was rebranded Macromedia Flash, the tool that defined interactive web animation for years. After Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, the authoring tool was renamed Adobe Flash Professional to distinguish it from the Flash Player runtime. On December 1, 2015, Adobe announced it would rename the program Adobe Animate — the first release under the new name shipped on February 8, 2016 — reflecting that much of the content made with it now targeted open formats like HTML5 Canvas and WebGL rather than the declining Flash Player.

Frequently Asked Questions

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