Fan Mail: Lottie

If you create animations or websites or both, check out the magic of Lottie animations – created by the design team at Airbnb.

Lottie is a new, open-source, SUPER simple way to export vector animations from Adobe After Effects as .JSON files for the web. These animations are crisper and smoother than GIFs or PNG sequence animations, are infinitely scalable without losing resolution, and have much smaller file sizes and faster load times. They also enable new levels of interactivity, such as playing an animation when you click something (think: “liking” a post) or matching the animation to the scrolling of a page like the desk illustration on our home page!

If you want to learn more about Lottie and see a batch of different examples, here is the instructions page that we followed to give life to our first few Lotties.

There is so much to learn, so much already out there, and so much potential still waiting to be discovered! All you need is After Effects and the Lottie plugin or this Bodymovin plugin.

Happy animating!

– Austin