Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Our journey has been a wild ride so far! We started off as a team of two in 2018, running a content marketing agency named Writer Shark. We grew pretty rapidly and in 2020 decided to start a YouTube channel named A Day In Time with our oldest client who we lovingly call Brother Anton. That was the year of Covid-19, and we started working remotely around that time. In fact, we have been working remotely ever since!

We didn’t really have a proper plan with our YouTube channel. Instead, we had a “go with the flow” attitude. And with the help of Debanjana (Lead Illustrator) and Debidas (Lead Animator), we refined things over time and always tried to improve our animations and workflow.

Our YouTube team grew to 17 members, but unfortunately, our channel didn’t get enough traction. And then… disaster struck!

With Google’s SEO algorithm changing and Generative AI coming into the picture in 2022, a lot of our content marketing clients were hit hard, with Anton being affected the most. Despite his efforts to help us move forward, we had to make a tough choice and give up on our YouTube plans.

We realized we had a very talented and creative team and wanted to establish ourselves as a Design Studio. That’s when we created our “A Day In Time” website and became intrigued by Lottie's animations.

We started taking part in competitions hosted by LottieFiles and won our first competition in December 2022 (The Christmas Challenge) That inspired us even more to learn the nuances of Lottie animations

Then, in 2023, we started our journey on Upwork, and once again, LottieFiles came to the rescue! Growing a new account can be a huge pain on a highly competitive platform like Upwork. Thanks to our winning a few Lottie competitions, we were able to land a few Lottie animation gigs.

In the meantime, we participated in the LottieFiles X Design Buddies Landing Page challenge and eventually won with our “A Day In Time” website homepage! We were really proud of that achievement!

As we grew on Upwork, we thought it was time to set up a new design agency website. That’s how Aristocat Studio came to be. We wanted to make it really unique and challenge ourselves.

We recently finished working on the website and are really happy about how it turned out. We had to make a lot of refinements to our Lottie animations, specifically related to performance optimization.

And that brings us to today… We owe a lot to LottieFiles (trust me, I’m not saying this because we are getting featured). Without LottieFiles, we just wouldn’t have been able to survive. So here’s a HUGE Thank You to the LottieFiles team for making all this possible.

How has LottieFiles improved your workflow and project outcomes with Lottie animations?

I’d say we learned the most by trial and error. In the beginning, the Lottie competitions were very helpful. We got inspired quite a bit to hone our skills and come up with creative concepts. Later on we were able to work on client projects where we refined our skills further.

Can you share a groundbreaking Lottie animation project and its impact?

I believe it has to be our Aristocat Studio website. We were quite ambitious about including many Lottie animations on a single page! That led to quite a few performance issues.

The project became a mess at one point. We even decided to make the code more modular by building it in React. While we were working on the React version, we also simplified our existing Lottie animations. Both steps helped in making the performance smooth in all browsers, especially in older mobile devices.

How do you incorporate Lottie animations into your projects, and what challenges do you face?

The main consideration is what platform the animation is aimed at. Because of the difference in features supported by web and mobile platforms, we need to plan our concepts accordingly.

Then there are certain considerations we take into account for the Safari browser. We have noticed if the project contains alpha matte layers, then the performance is not as smooth in Safari.

What sources inspire your Lottie animation designs? Can you recommend any artists, websites, or resources?

We mainly look for inspiration from Pinterest, Behance, and Dribbble. We even hang out quite a bit in Instagram

What feature or improvement would you like to see in LottieFiles to better support motion designers?

I wish I could list a few, but the most important one would be support for the 3D features within After Effects. I feel Extrudalizer isn’t the best solution. It feels more like a workaround.

What would be your key piece of advice to new motion designers who are just starting out?

I’ll steal Nike’s tagline - Just do it! And keep at it! A lot of times we get overwhelmed seeing a complex project. It’s important to break things down into easy to understand chunks and tackle them one by one.

I hope whoever is reading this finds success, and more importantly, happiness in your endeavors.