January 23, 2023

Handoff Tax

Handoffs — passing work from one person to another — can be serious drags on productivity. They create delays by adding artificial speed bumps to collaborative work. In particular, designers and developers, who often work with wildly different tools, play a vicious game of ping pong. Designers strive for visual excellence; developers build for functionality. Their tools help them achieve those outcomes but tend to add friction to the collaborative process.

The designer-to-developer handoff usually requires significant documentation and review. A typical design relationship that includes interactive animations might go something like this:

·  Design in one tool
·  Animate in another
·  Redline or create motion docs to help developers recreate everything in code or…
·  …export from a motion design tool with limited interactivity
·  Developers follow specs to implement the designer’s vision
·  Designers cannot easily make changes or iterate past this point without starting most of this cycle over again.

Iterating through this process, with total documentation and implementation of interactions takes hours of precious creator time.

Rive + Gatsby = Rise of the Robots, Rive

Funding

Rive, an interactive animation design tool and runtime, raised $10m in Series A funding.

Amberflo, a platform for building and deploying usage-based pricing, raised $15m in Series A funding.

LinkPay, a payments platform that helps developers integrate open banking into their products, raised $20m in Series A funding.

Cloudian, a file and object storage company specializing in S3-compatible object storage systems, raised $60m in growth funding.