Lottie Spotlight: Henrique Rossatto on Being a Motion Designer

Henrique Rossatto is a motion designer based in Brazil. Here’s what he shared with us on using motion design in design systems, working with clients and starting out in the world of motion.

Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Maybe I can describe myself as I’ve posted on Dribbble: “I'm an Animator passionate about Lottie Animations”. Today I’m a motion designer on the Design Ops team for BTG Pactual. I work with designers and devs creating animations and micro-interactions for several products in the bank. On the personal side, I love to play online games with my friends, and I have a rabbit as a pet.

Why is creating your own animations so mind-blowing?

When we work with web/app animations, we typically face problems when exporting it for development. But working with Lottie makes it easier. Understanding how to recreate a specific animation and make it work after exporting it is the best feeling when we work with Lottie.

I’m a motion designer, but I work with motion for components in a design system. I try to use Lottie to create interactions with each component using lottie-interactivity, making it more clear for developers when they recreate the same component animation with code.

So even when using Lottie as a final asset for implementation, this tool continues to be a game changer for situations we face when creating motion for the web and apps.

Here is some of my work:

How does using motion help when making your client proposal?

When we are creating our proposal, I believe that the most important thing is to understand what the clients are looking for. By inserting similar motion jobs into your portfolio, it makes it easier for the client to understand your work and if it fits in their projects. This helps to align the expectations between what the clients want as final delivery and what you can provide for them.

In an emerging market like Brazil, motion design has so much potential. How do you encourage your team to be a Lottie advocate like yourself?

We try to show that we can use Lottie in our projects, and how we can use it to improve our products with animations. In our design system team, we have some freedom to look for solutions that will help make our job better and easier for those who will use our library.

So one of our milestones is to understand how we can link some parts of our Lottie animation code with the data in our library, creating more value in our final product. Having a good relationship with the dev team is key to this.

What do you wish you knew before embarking into the world of motion?

I believe that when we are starting in any area, understanding how to create proposals and how much to charge for jobs is important. When we are starting out in any area, we aren't sure what to consider when creating our proposals and making it fair for our work and for who is paying for the service. When I started on a freelancer site, I looked for similar profiles of other freelancers to understand how much they were charging their jobs.

Do you have any advice for the motion community?

Be open to helping anyone who is starting out in the motion industry.