Lottie Spotlight: Anna Davydov on LottieFiles and Her Motion Journey

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Hey, I’m Anna, a graphic and motion marketing designer based in Israel. Mom of a two-year-old girl and a five-year-old cat. Passionate about design and painting.

Tell us about your journey being a self-learned designer doing freelancing work.

I studied animation a bit when I was a college and university student. But it was a while ago, so a lot has changed since then. When I joined my current company one day I just saw a cool animation created by our freelancer. It made me really curious about how the animation was done and exported as code. So I spent my weekend googling and trying different tutorials on YouTube.

One of my first projects was animating product demos for my company’s web site. Here is an example of one of them.

Why is creating your own animation so mind-blowing?

For me, animation is kind of the next level of design. With motion graphics you can tell the whole story and communicate really complicated messages in a more simple language of visual elements. You try once and then you just can’t stop.

It’s also great fun to create animations for holidays and special occasions.

Recently I really enjoyed making these two quick but cute things:

• Confetti for a partnership page header
• Illustration for my tutorial on making a morphing animation

How is using Lottie beneficial to your daily work?

The ability of Lottie to export animation from Adobe After Effects as code gives me more freedom. I don’t need to edit code manually, I just do what I love – visual design.

I easily use Lottie animations both for web and landing pages along with mobile app animations.

How do you plan to help the upcoming generation to succeed in the world of animation?

As a Lottie Evangelist I’m planning to prepare some motion design tutorials based on my experience. And I really hope it will help more designers to dive into this beautiful world of animation. I also think that animation for augmented reality (AR) could be a cool next step to take.

Do you have any advice for the motion community?

Don’t be afraid to try and experiment as much as possible. Sometimes people think motion design is too complicated, that’s not true actually :) Just go and start making little steps. It’s really fun.