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What is an Aphelio?

An Aphelio is a compact, vector-native motion file that travels with your product the same way a static asset does. Each one weighs a few kilobytes, redraws crisply on any panel, and plays back identically in a browser, a phone build or an embedded screen. AphelioLab is where teams author, review and ship them.

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Frame sequence

GIF

Aphelio

Why Aphelio?

Four things this format does that sprite sheets and video files never managed.

Kilobytes, not megabytes

An Aphelio stores curves and keyframes instead of frames, so a six-second loop lands around 9 kB — roughly a fortieth of the same clip exported as video.

Sharp at any size

Every shape stays a vector, so one file is crisp on a 320-pixel watch face and on a four-metre lobby panel with no second export.

Runtimes on eleven platforms

The same file drops into web bundles, mobile builds, desktop shells and game engines. Each player reads it directly — nothing is re-cut per target.

Layers you can address

Groups, paths and colours keep their names and stay reachable at runtime, so an Aphelio can answer to scroll position, a cursor, or live data from your app.

The world runs on Aphelio

Aphelio files ship inside 138,400+ products — and in a fair number of the tools you already keep open.

VEGARA sirion Polara ALTAIRO cygnera

lyrion RIGELITH mirachi DRACORA Selenar Nocturn halcorn

Browse every integration

know
and love.

polara

Marketing sites that move

Double streak day

quillo

Reward moments that feel earned

Reaction packs inside chat

Motion is no longer
a finishing touch

…and AphelioLab makes it routine.

RIGELITH

Dial and face motion for wearables

The
Meridian

Data stories that move

Pairing your device

cygnera

First-run walkthroughs

How to get started with Aphelio

Tools and reading to help you ship your first file this week.

STEP 1

Find or make an Aphelio

Find an animation

Browse a library of 91,000 ready-to-drop files, free to use in commercial work.

Then recolour any of them to your own brand with the Palette tool or the Aphelio Editor.

Browse the library

AphelioLab Discover Create Learn Plans

Your route into the largest library of free motion files

Top contributors

Trending

Or build one from scratch

If you have some animation chops, export straight out of your motion app with our plugin. Otherwise bring an SVG and let the converter apply a preset.

Keyframe Suite plugin Aphelio Creator SVG to Aphelio

STEP 2

Use your Aphelio

Use Aphelios in your design, code and productivity tools

Glimra Nyxel CMS Solvane Code Perigra Workspace Quasari Suite

Aphelio libraries for developers

Mobile, native Embedded screens Desktop shells Web, JavaScript Cross-platform UI Game engines

Aphelio also plays natively in a few dozen other tools

Browse every integration

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The history of Aphelio

2011

Motion designers handed animation over as a reference clip. Engineers either rebuilt it by hand in code or shipped a heavy sprite sheet and hoped nobody looked closely. Either way the result drifted from what was approved, and any change meant starting the loop over.

2013

Ines Kováts wrote a small exporter that walked a motion project's layer tree and wrote it out as plain text instead of pixels. She paired it with a browser player that redrew the curves at runtime — the first time an animation could be reviewed in a pull request rather than emailed round as a clip.

2016

Engineers Dario Feld, Priya Raghunath and Tomas Bekele at a travel marketplace saw what the format solved. They teamed up with motion lead Ada Oyelaran to write the first phone-side players, and named the file an Aphelio.

AphelioLab launched!

AphelioLab opened as a place to test, host and share these files, with a public library on the first day and a web player anyone could embed.

2021

A desktop-platform foundation released a native C# renderer, putting Aphelio on desktop operating systems and inside a large chunk of enterprise software.

2022

Two more renderers arrived in the same year: a C++ engine small enough for appliance firmware, and a declarative binding that put Aphelio on in-car dashboards and kiosk screens.

2024

.aphx arrived: an open container that packs several Aphelio files together with the fonts, bitmaps and theme variants they depend on, so one asset covers a whole flow.

FAQ

What exactly is inside an Aphelio file? How does an Aphelio compare with plain SVG? Why not just ship a GIF? Which player do I need to install? How do I author one from scratch? Can I recolour a file after it is exported? Is AphelioLab free for a small team? Where can I learn the format properly? Can I edit an Aphelio in the browser?

Learn more

Read the field notes

How-to guides, interviews, teardowns and inspiration

Aphelio School

Short courses on motion craft, handoff and performance

Join the guild

Meet other creators, designers and engineers using the format

Live sessions

Streams, office hours and workshops every month

Design. Review. Ship.

Bring motion into the work your team already does every day.

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