If you’ve ever worked on a team project, you’ll know that things can get messy. There are multiple channels of communication, different people editing the same files and rounds of revision and feedback. That’s why some of the most-loved apps today are those that help us collaborate in real time – think Figma for design, Pitch for presentations and Notion for documentation.
And what of motion design?
That’s where LottieFiles comes in. We’re excited to show you new features that we’ve been working on, that will blend within your design workflow and save your team countless hours. Here’s a rundown of LottieFiles’ new collaborative features, and how you can get started.
1. Team or company workspaces
LottieFiles now offers team or company workspaces. Anyone in your workspace can view, edit and leave feedback on your animations (unless you restrict permission settings), making it easy to collaborate on motion.
To invite members to your workspace, click + Invite Members in the bottom left corner of your dashboard. Type in one or more email addresses, then click Invite. You can assign them two roles:
- Admin – manages team members and all content within the team’s workspace.
- Member – manages all content within the team’s workspace.
What if you wanted to show your Lottie animations to a client or someone outside your team, but don’t want them to access all the content within your workspace? That’s easy – every project and individual animation comes with its own permission settings. If you’ve ever set sharing permissions in Google Drive files and folders, this will seem familiar to you.
To share with external stakeholders, click the ‘share’ button on each project page or animation page. Type any email address and assign them any of these three access types – full access, download access or view access only.
By default, every project or animation in your team workspace is automatically shared with your team. To change this, you can also use these settings to limit who gets access.
2. Personal workspaces
You’ll also get your own personal workspace – this is where you can store all your private projects and animation assets that you’re not ready to share with others yet. When you’re ready, you can move them over to a team workspace. However, you can still create sharable links to share your work with others.
3. Version history
Team collaboration is great…until there are multiple people working on the same files, and you’ve lost track of who’s edited what, who’s got the latest files.
That’s why we’ve introduced a handy version history feature. This lets you track all changes made by anyone on your team. You restore older versions anytime, or even upload a file from your local drive to replace the current version. And it doesn’t just track changes made on the LottieFiles platform – with the LottieFiles plugin for Adobe After Effects, you can even track changes made through this design tool.
To access this feature, head to any Lottie animation page and click on the version history button.
4. Give and receive feedback
Great team collaboration depends on great team communication. But having too many channels – e-mail, Slack, Trello or even face-to-face – makes it hard to collaborate on projects. So to make it easier to give and receive feedback right within LottieFiles, we've worked on a few new features:
a) Commenting
Leave or invite comments on any Lottie animation. To add a comment, you can click on an animation, or click the comment button next to the timeline, to add a comment specific to a keyframe. You can also hit C on your keyboard to bring up the Comments panel, and add a comment there.
b) Animation status
Change an animation’s status during your review process. You can specify work in progress, needs review or approved in the top right corner of an animation page.
c) Team action notifications
Stay on top of what everyone is working on. Get notified when someone uploads a new file, adds comments or changes an animation’s status.
5. Access your animations from Figma or Adobe XD
As a designer, does this sound familiar? You’ve just created a mockup or prototype, complete with animations your team has created…only for someone to point out that these animations have been updated, and that you’re using older versions. So you’ll need to hunt down the latest files, and re-insert them into your designs.
Here’s good news – you don’t have to worry about that anymore. The LottieFiles for Figma and Adobe XD plugins let you insert your latest Lottie animations, whether they’re from your private or team workspaces. Any change you or your team makes to an animation is automatically reflected in the plugin. Insert any animation in just a few clicks. You can do it right within Figma or Adobe XD, so there’s no need to switch apps or tabs and risk getting distracted. Boom – a better design workflow across all your tools.
6. Easy developer handoff
Here’s how the handoff process works with conventional animation formats: a designer may typically create an animation in a motion design or prototyping tool. Then they’d hand it off to a developer – along with detailed specifications of how the animation should function. The developer may need to recreate the same animation with code.
With LottieFiles, this process is a lot simpler.
Handing off Lottie animations is as easy as handing off a JPEG or PNG. You’d just be handing off a single asset file for each animation. Then, developers can implement them with the Lottie libraries available for the web, iOS and Android. With these libraries, adding Lottie animation – and specifying simple or complex interactions – is easy. And of course, there’s no need to code animations from scratch. This can save up to weeks of development.
Start collaborating with your team
We hope these new features speed up your design workflow and make working in a team easy – or even fun! Get started by creating a team or company workspace, then invite anyone by email. It’s never been easier to collaborate on motion design.
