4 years with Anima: “what used to take 1 week now takes 1 day”4 min read

For Gaia Zuccaro, a UX/UI freelancer for the past 10 years, design is something of a passion. In her day-to-day work life, she teaches UX design while maintaining a large Italian client base that includes consulting firms, startups, large corporations, and everything in-between.

Gaia creates websites, landing pages, and other digital touchpoints for her clients. She started out like most designers—designing with static images, explaining her ideas, and iterating repeatedly before development. But all of that changed 4 years ago when she discovered Anima for Sketch (and eventually switched to Anima for Figma).

Anima: a design-to-code platform for the entire team

“Clients often ask to verify if something is working before investing time in development. It makes sense and it’s a really important part of what I do today.”

Now instead of explaining her ideas with images and words, she could demonstrate her designs’ actual functionality using Anima—right from her existing design tool.

“I would often get the question from my clients if there is something out there to reduce development time? So I went on the lookout and that’s when I discovered Anima—first with Sketch thanks to the auto-layout feature.”

When asked what she loves the most about working with Anima, Gaia responded:

“I really like Anima because when I show Anima’s output to clients, they can already see it as a finished product, with layouts and micro-animations giving life to it. There is no need to envision anything, it is all there in front of their eyes.”

Gaia handed this high fidelity prototype to the developer for a major Italian bank

Reducing design iteration and dev time

Gaia’s client base includes impressive companies like Rai, one of Italy’s largest broadcasting stations, as well as numerous Italian banks and luxury design companies. She crafts a diverse range of websites and web apps, but one thing is constant. She uses Anima to save her clients a lot of time, money, and frustration.

“One of the companies I have worked with for many years now would use Photoshop. I helped transition them into Sketch and now recently with Figma, bringing Anima along the way from day one. You can imagine the leap from Photoshop to prototypes with Anima, they are very pleased.”

As a designer on corporate-scale projects, Gaia works closely with a ton of developers. And it’s no secret that designers and developers speak different languages. But using Anima as her “translator” has allowed Gaia to build great relationships with developers—especially when she’s saving them at least 30% of their coding time.

With Anima, Gaia has the power to overwrite some CSS transitions using skew transition 

“At first the developers I work with were skeptical, but when I hand off Anima’s code, they realize that they can navigate it easily enough and they quickly find that ultimately, Anima is doing at least 30% of the work for them. It’s a great base for them to build off, and this creates such a good workflow between us that things just speed up and run smoothly.”

A landing page Gaia created for a joint venture between a startup and an Italian bank: here she was able to export code and make changes to the CSS-typing effects in the HTML

From a week to a day

We asked Gaia what was the biggest advantage for her of using Anima for all these years:

“Anima provides 2 values: it saves time and money. I can design in Figma, turn it into something interactive, get feedback and make changes in a really comfortable way. I then get to hand off something to development that brings a final result in 1 day instead of 1 week.”

Gaia designed this form request and connected it to her email account using Figma with Anima

Better for clients, better for business

By breathing life into her ideas with Anima, Gaia is able to work faster and more productively with her clients. She’s also able to work in unison with developers by handing them quality code for the UI along with high fidelity prototypes. This saves devs a ton of grunt work coding the UI from scratch and guarantees the final product is exactly what she intended.

Anima has given Gaia the ability to bring her ideas to life swiftly, without compromising on quality.

Want to speed up your workflow, eliminate the handoff blues, and impress your clients at the same time? Try Anima now!