Author of the iOS side of things here. Feel Free to ask any questions!
First of all, thank you for making this an open-source project.
I've noticed Airbnb has been very open with the design community about the internal processes and tools, whereas most companies keep their employees under NDAs. So my 2 questions are:
1. Did your team have to advocate for budget to create these tools, to write blog posts and to share them for free, or did Airbnb already had a plan to support this kind of research? How does this "make sense" for the typical budget-oriented PMs?
2. Did your team approach Adobe to see if they were already working on a tool like this? How does the initial planning go for these kind of projects?
Lottie looks super interesting, but the first questions that pop up in my mind are all about the planning and research behind such amazing (side?)projects and the people behind them.
Thanks!
There’s plenty of stuff we haven’t shown off yet, but I’d hope that almost everything will at least be written about, but ideally open sourced too.
My team is focused on building tooling every day. We think of our work in three buckets: - Integrated Toolchain — next-gen design software built around our Design System[1] (and componentized systems design as a whole), with a view to making our design & eng processes radically more efficient. Mostly proactive projects born from observing the cracks across the org. We just work on it; our experience is that external design software companies have little awareness of the challenges we actually face. Facebook's design tools team is a big inspiration here - they're doing really exciting things.
- Information Systems — there’s lots of knowledge spread out across the design org & Airbnb as a whole, and we like collaborating with other teams to solve their workflow needs. This is typically more difficult to release because it’s baked into internal systems. Airshots[2] is an example of this, and we’ll be sharing another system soon.
- Experiments — as hybrid designer-engineers we tend to get pulled into different prototyping projects across the org, typically for new initiatives with exotic tech that we can’t talk about just yet.
Regarding ‘releasing’ & writing about these things — they’re important for us as a design brand, and we have the full backing (& encouragement) of our design leadership to share this stuff.
As previously noted, we have a pretty legit open source policy and it was one of the reasons I joined.
Again I want to stress that Lottie isn’t one of our projects, but I hope that helps!
[1] http://airbnb.design/building-a-visual-language/
[2] http://airbnb.design/airshots-discovering-a-workflow-for-app...
I've been trying to create something like this but on a much smaller scale within my team, however, most of the time the challenge ends up being intimidating for designers, even experienced ones.
I'm sure the openness of Airbnb also helps to recruit top talent!
Good luck, and thanks for sharing, it's inspiring for the ones of us with the ambition of designing the future tools designers will use.
Some of this come from a mixture of architectures, and the fact we are using Swift+Objc, or just large asset files. Its something we are actively working on fixing. One of the things we did to make it better was build Lottie! Now we can replace PNG sequences and Gifs that can be several megabytes with simple JSON animation files which measure in the low kilobytes. One such example is the diamond animation found on our listing pages. To include this in the project before Lottie we had to package a PNG sequence for each screen resolution(@1x @2x @3x) with alpha these sequences would add around 4-5 megabytes to our app for a single, small, animation. With Lottie we package a single JSON file which measures around 2 kilobytes!