A senior designer learned to export Lottie animations from Figma after an engineer asked for them. She spent four to five hours on a YouTube tutorial, figured out the workflow, and delivered the files herself instead of waiting for help. Taking on unfamiliar work, she says, moves your career forward.
Never skip an opportunity to learn a new skill. Quick story about how I learned how to add animations to my designs and hand it off to engineers. So I was working on a design not too long ago and it had some animations in it. Obviously on Figma, those animations would be static. I sent that to engineers and they're like, how do we get to use these animations? Can you help us send the Lottie files for that? I've been hearing about Lottie files. I've never had to use it, so I don't know about it. So yeah, senior designer, 7+ years experience, doesn't know about animations in Figma. I reached out to the brand team and I was like, hey, Could you help with this animation? How do I create this? And one of them was like, no, don't worry, just send it to us and we'll send back to you in 30 minutes. And I'm like, nah, send me a resource, send me a link or any kind of, um, tool that you use for it, and I'll try to learn how to do it. And then they sent me the tool, I got on YouTube, so I learned how to do it. I struggled with it for about 4 to 5 hours, created the animation, and sent the Lottie to the engineer. So yeah, new skill in the bag. So never skip an opportunity to learn a new skill. It's going to take you so far.
