Who am I?
My name is Salih and i’m a Creative Director / Motion Designer passionate about the blend of entertainment and technology. I love creating a good old fashioned 30 second commercial but also bridging the two halves of my career by bringing brand thinking into the way digital products move and feel. Even though I’ve won awards, given talks, written articles, had Fast Company and Communication Arts write articles about me I keep my process simple. I’m a “what if” kind of guy who loves doing dope work with interesting clients that have challenging problems.
Between 2003 and 2012, I designed and animated commercials at various design shops, agencies and broadcast networks in New York City. After moving to San Francisco, I spent almost three years at Square as a motion graphics designer on its video team, doing short-form animations and compositing for live-action commercials. Next I spent over six years at Airbnb, collaborating with various teams and using motion / animation to solve product challenges on web and native platforms. I’m part of the four-person team responsible for launching Lottie, an Android, iOS, Web and React Native library that helps designers and engineers add high-quality animation to any web or native product. Since 2018 Lottie has been used by hundreds of thousands of companies worldwide and is now the de-facto standard for animation on native platforms. I’m currently a Creative Director / Principal Motion Designer at CōLab.
Articles, INTERVIEWS, videos & PODCASTS
Staff.design
Staff Design is a collection of interviews exploring how product designers navigate the individual contributor path to its highest levels.
A beginners guide to Lottie
If you’re brand new to making Lottie animations then this course is for you. How to create and optimize animations for Lottie. By the end of the course, you’ll have successfully created your first Lottie animation and gotten a good handle of animation techniques and principles.
SXSW 2018 scaling design systems: Pixels to people
Design systems shape the experiences people have with your products. They’re visual, tactile, emotive...and practical. They help people get things done, and along the way shape perceptions about products and brands. As we scale, design system teams work with increasingly diverse groups, and the web of collaborations becomes more complex. This evolution requires that we consider every relationship—from pixels to people. Come learn how we're scaling systems at Google, Airbnb, IBM, and Microsoft.
Animating all the right moves
Interview in the Insights section of Communication Arts. "Salih Abdul-Karim explains how motion design can give projects just the groove they need."
Android summit 2017 - High Quality Animation in Native Products
Lottie is an Android, iOS and React Native library that renders After Effects animations in real time. Open sourced to the public in February 2017, it’s been embraced by the Android community and allowed tens of thousands of companies and individuals to easily put animations in their products. I spoke about at what Lottie is, how it works and the ways the community is using it. I also digged into the motion principles in Airbnb’s “Design Language System”, a visual language that connects over a hundred teams of designers and engineers, and the role Lottie plays in enabling more motion in our products.
Which came first, the algorithm or the artwork?
In this Motionographer article I interviewed Nicolas Ménard about his curiosity for data visualization, how he balanced that with the need to present a strong narrative, as well as the pros and cons of creating animations with data instead of keyframes.
Intro to design UX
Afrotech 2017
Design Details Podcast
Today Bryn Jackson and Brian Lovin caught up with Salih Abdul-Karim, an experience and motion designer at Airbnb and a member of the team that created Lottie, an open source tool to easily add animations to native apps. In this episode we dig into Salih's journey into motion design, moving from NYC to SF, freelancing versus big co work, and so much more.
The Airbnb tool that's changing UI design
Uber, Google, Instacart, and others are all adopting Airbnb's prototyping tool, Lottie. Interview and article by Mark Wilson.
The Future of Lottie
Our community-driven vision for our animation tool.
Modern Pictograms for Lottie
A collaboration with The Noun Project & John Caserta on open-source animated icons.
Icons in motion
The Noun Project interview about how to turn icons into moving animations for Lottie.
Introducing Lottie
Behind the scenes of our new open-source animation tool.
School of motion
Dig into the details and backstory of Lottie on the School of motion Podcast
Airbnb: Communicating Clarity and Charm
Google design blog interview, alongside Karri Saarinen, about how Airbnb uses material design.
Setting the mood
How film title sequences informed Airbnbs Apple TV on-boarding