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Comment by 72mena | Hacker News Reader

My questions may be off-topic (maybe more fit for an AMA with the design/engineering Airbnb team).

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!

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We also have a Design Tools team at Airbnb (source: I’m on it. hi.). Whilst Lottie was developed outside of our team, I think it’s representative of the kinds of projects we love.

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...

buba447, therealsalih, jongold: Thank you for taking the time for the detailed answers. The workflow and the mindset from your teams sounds inspiring.

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.

Great questions! 1. Lottie started as a ios hackathon project with our motion designer and me. The idea was to just try and get something out of after effect and simply moving on screen. We ended up getting quite a bit further and wanted to keep working on it. For a while we were working on it in our spare time. Airbnb is a great place for open source. Open sourcing code is encouraged by the company. So we made a roadmap of what we wantsd to accomplish, a list of benefits and gains, along with a wish list of future possibilities for lottie and took it to our managers. Basically we pitched it. We also looped in a few product teams and found a handful of small places to use lottie. We also brought on an Abdroid engineer. After this we got approval to move forward with lottie in a 30/70 type fashion. Over all we spent nearly a year, from hackathin to release, on Lottie. We checked out what others were working on and reached out to bodymovin and squall. I cant remember if we reached out to adobe.

I helped out on design/animation side of things for Lottie. Just to add a little more clarification. When we first saw bodymovin we started working on Lottie very slowly. THEN Squall came out, and I basically begged Marcus Eckert to invite me to the private beta. He graciously did and I showed off Squall to all the engineers, we were very excited about it. But after vetting it and having lots of conversations about putting Squall in our app, we ended up continuing to make our own version so we could have more control in the end. After all, we had made so much progress already, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel and knew we only had a matter of weeks to get something usable. We still do use Squall for its dope After Effects preview app in our design work flow though.

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