Lottie articles and design guides

Lottie put vector animation on the web without the weight of video or the jank of GIFs, but shipping it well is its own skill. These articles cover exporting clean JSON from After Effects, trimming file size, controlling playback on scroll, and the gotchas that make a Lottie look great in preview and broken in production. Real examples, real file sizes.

There's a recurring theme in these pieces: most Lottie problems start in After Effects, not in the player. Unsupported effects drop silently, expressions get baked at export, and a 400KB JSON usually traces back to one stray shape layer carrying hundreds of vertices. We cover the audit habits that catch all three before anything ships. Should every icon animation be a Lottie? Honestly no, and we say so.