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Question

Resize Origin/Anchor Position in Motion

  • June 28, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 0 views
Cammy Hogg

I’m encountering an issue in Figma Motion.

I want to animate a rectangle to grow from its centre (expand equally left and right). However, when I animate the ‘Width’ property, the rectangle always appears to grow from left to right, as if the transform origin is fixed to the left edge.

The rectangle is constrained to centre/centre (in the design tab), and there are no auto-layouts applied to the parent frame.

Not sure if it’s me or the product? Feels like a pretty basic feature to be missing!

Edit: It seems like the origin is set to centre if you manually drag to resize while holding the ⌥ key... not ideal

1 reply

adamsmasher
Figmate
  • adamsmasher
  • Figmate
  • June 28, 2026

Hey, ​@Cammy Hogg! Thanks for trying out Motion. Hopefully this hasn’t been too confusing an experience for you. There are actually two ways to achieve this depending on how much you want to customize it.

 

The quick way.

The simplest way to do this is to use the pre-built Scale animation. After switching to Motion, click the + in the Animation section of the Properties panel, then choose Scale. For the type, choose Custom and then for the axis option choose Width. This scales from the center as you are expecting.

A screenshot showing the Scale animation configured for width.

 

The manual way

If you want to do this manually so you have fine tuned control over each part of the animation, you’ll need to animate both a change in the width and a change in position. Essentially, you need to animate the position in the opposite direction of the direction the width grows at half the amount of change in width.

A screenshot showing both animation layers added manually

 

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