What Is HeyMotion?
A plain-language tour of HeyMotion: browser-based branded motion graphics from a library of templates, re-skinned by your brand, exported privately as MP4.
#Overview
HeyMotion is a tool for making branded, animated video graphics — the kind of moving text, stats, callouts, and lower-thirds you see in polished YouTube videos and social clips. It runs entirely in your web browser at https://heymotion.io/app. There's nothing to download and no timeline to learn.
You don't need to be a designer or a motion artist. You pick a template from a library of 104, type your own words and numbers into a few fields, and HeyMotion produces a finished animation styled to your brand. Then you export it as an MP4 and drop it into your editor.
#How it works — the "brand once" model
The core idea is that you set your brand a single time and it flows into everything.
In the Brand panel you define 7 color slots (canvas, surface, text, muted, two accents, and border), 3 font slots (a display, a UI, and a mono typeface), a canvas background style, and a logo — either an uploaded image or up to three lines of logo text plus a handle. From that point on, every template re-skins live from those tokens. Change your accent color and every counter, chart, and callout updates instantly.
This is what separates HeyMotion from grabbing a one-off template somewhere: you never restyle graphics one at a time. The look is defined once and inherited everywhere. Your brand is saved in your browser, and if you sign in, synced to the cloud so it follows you between devices. Full detail lives in the Brand Kit section.
Colors come only from your brand tokens — there is no per-template color override in the app today. That's a deliberate design so nothing ever drifts off-brand.
#What you can make
The library is organized into 9 categories. Each is a family of related graphics:
- Core — the everyday essentials: chapter cards, headlines, big counters, progress bars, compare cards, and end cards.
- Story — narrative beats: quote cards, big questions, myth-vs-fact, before/after, verdict stamps, and "wait" beat cards.
- Lists — anything enumerated: checklists, numbered lists, timelines, pros & cons, feature grids, and agendas.
- Data — numbers made visual: stat trios, bar and line charts, donut percentages, leaderboards, gauges, and money counters.
- Tech — software moments: terminal typing, chat bubbles, code diffs, file trees, API request/response flows, and toggle switches.
- Devices — your content shown on a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop frame, plus prompt boxes for ChatGPT and Claude.
- Subscribe — dedicated subscribe prompts in a few styles.
- Overlays — green-screen graphics (sidebars, lower-thirds, arrow callouts, subscribe bars) meant to be chroma-keyed over your footage.
- Transitions — short wipes, zoom punches, glitch cuts, and iris moves to cut between shots.
Every template is a fill-in-the-blank: the words, numbers, and images are yours to change; the motion is built in and always looks right.
#How it exports — in-browser and private
When you click Export MP4, HeyMotion renders the video 100% in-browser (WebCodecs + a virtual-time clock). Nothing is uploaded to a server to export. It uses WebCodecs and a virtual-time clock to render frame by frame, which makes exports frame-perfect. The finished file — a 30fps MP4 — downloads straight to your browser's Downloads folder.
Because everything happens locally, nothing you type or upload leaves your machine to make a video. That's a real privacy benefit, and it's covered in more depth in the Privacy section.
In-browser video encoding needs a Chromium-based browser. A Chromium-based browser with WebCodecs support (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc). Safari/Firefox support for in-browser encoding is limited. You can preview in other browsers, but export may not work.
#Accounts, presets, and the MCP server
You can use the whole studio and export finished clips without an account. Signing in adds two things: your brand kit syncs to the cloud, and you can save presets — named snapshots of a template plus its content — that appear in the sidebar for one-click reuse.
For power users, HeyMotion also ships an MCP server so you can drive it from Claude with natural language — listing templates, rendering previews, and rendering clips. It offers a local install for unlimited private rendering and a beta remote connector. See the MCP section for setup.
#When to Use It
Reach for HeyMotion whenever you need a short, on-brand animated insert: a stat pop, a subscribe prompt, an animated quote, a timeline, a lower-third, or a transition between shots. It's built for the graphics that make a video feel produced, not for full-length edits — you assemble those in your normal editor and drop these clips in.
#Related Articles
Continue with Who It's For, or jump into Create Your First Graphic.