We also have a Design Tools team at Airbnb (source: I’m on it. hi.). Whilst Lottie was developed outside of our team, I think it’s representative of the kinds of projects we love.
There’s plenty of stuff we haven’t shown off yet, but I’d hope that almost everything will at least be written about, but ideally open sourced too.
My team is focused on building tooling every day. We think of our work in three buckets:
- Integrated Toolchain — next-gen design software built around our Design System[1] (and componentized systems design as a whole), with a view to making our design & eng processes radically more efficient. Mostly proactive projects born from observing the cracks across the org. We just work on it; our experience is that external design software companies have little awareness of the challenges we actually face. Facebook's design tools team is a big inspiration here - they're doing really exciting things.
- Information Systems — there’s lots of knowledge spread out across the design org & Airbnb as a whole, and we like collaborating with other teams to solve their workflow needs. This is typically more difficult to release because it’s baked into internal systems. Airshots[2] is an example of this, and we’ll be sharing another system soon.
- Experiments — as hybrid designer-engineers we tend to get pulled into different prototyping projects across the org, typically for new initiatives with exotic tech that we can’t talk about just yet.
Regarding ‘releasing’ & writing about these things — they’re important for us as a design brand, and we have the full backing (& encouragement) of our design leadership to share this stuff.
As previously noted, we have a pretty legit open source policy and it was one of the reasons I joined.
Again I want to stress that Lottie isn’t one of our projects, but I hope that helps!
buba447, therealsalih, jongold:
Thank you for taking the time for the detailed answers. The workflow and the mindset from your teams sounds inspiring.
I've been trying to create something like this but on a much smaller scale within my team, however, most of the time the challenge ends up being intimidating for designers, even experienced ones.
I'm sure the openness of Airbnb also helps to recruit top talent!
Good luck, and thanks for sharing, it's inspiring for the ones of us with the ambition of designing the future tools designers will use.
There’s plenty of stuff we haven’t shown off yet, but I’d hope that almost everything will at least be written about, but ideally open sourced too.
My team is focused on building tooling every day. We think of our work in three buckets: - Integrated Toolchain — next-gen design software built around our Design System[1] (and componentized systems design as a whole), with a view to making our design & eng processes radically more efficient. Mostly proactive projects born from observing the cracks across the org. We just work on it; our experience is that external design software companies have little awareness of the challenges we actually face. Facebook's design tools team is a big inspiration here - they're doing really exciting things.
- Information Systems — there’s lots of knowledge spread out across the design org & Airbnb as a whole, and we like collaborating with other teams to solve their workflow needs. This is typically more difficult to release because it’s baked into internal systems. Airshots[2] is an example of this, and we’ll be sharing another system soon.
- Experiments — as hybrid designer-engineers we tend to get pulled into different prototyping projects across the org, typically for new initiatives with exotic tech that we can’t talk about just yet.
Regarding ‘releasing’ & writing about these things — they’re important for us as a design brand, and we have the full backing (& encouragement) of our design leadership to share this stuff.
As previously noted, we have a pretty legit open source policy and it was one of the reasons I joined.
Again I want to stress that Lottie isn’t one of our projects, but I hope that helps!
[1] http://airbnb.design/building-a-visual-language/
[2] http://airbnb.design/airshots-discovering-a-workflow-for-app...