Karri Saarinen is a technically minded designer, speaker and entrepreneur who leads the design systems work at Airbnb. From Finland, living in San Francisco, he drives systematic thinking for design.
Introducing the more enjoyable and efficient way to manage software development and issue tracking with linear.app A few weeks ago I left my role as Principal Designer at Airbnb to start a new company. While I was excited about the work at Airbnb and I had the opportunity to work on great projects where I felt that I learned a lot. Most recently worked on setting of the product design direction…
Originally posted on Airbnb.design blog with the title Working Type – How we introduced Airbnb Cereal to our UI . On May 15, 2018, Airbnb launched a new typeface called Airbnb Cereal across our product and brand. Airbnb Cereal was created in partnership with Dalton Maag—a global font foundry—and Airbnb’s Marketing and Experience Design teams. Typographic decisions are usually made on a brand…
Today we released Lottie , an iOS, Android, and React Native library that renders After Effects animations in real time, allowing apps to use animations as easily as they use static images. To use Lottie, you can make animation in After Effects as you would normally and export it as json using the Lottie Plugin. Developer can then integrate our Lottie library in the app, and just tell it which…
Last month we flew down to LA to receive Google's Material Design Award for the Airbnb mobile apps. While the app is using our own design system and expressing our brand, Google found it a good example of simplified design that follows similar principles than their own Material Design. October also marked my one year at Airbnb. I’ve been lucky to work with such great people and projects. The…
Originally posted in Airbnb Design blog . Working in software development and design, we are often required to ship one-off solutions. Sometimes we’re working within time constraints and sometimes we just haven’t yet agreed upon a path forward. These one-off solutions aren’t inherently bad, but if they aren’t built upon a solid foundation, we eventually find ourselves having to pay back accrued…
Introduction Coinbase was founded in May 2012 to help people use and securely store their bitcoin.By the time I joined them, the team had been developing the product without any designers or much emphasis on design. Also in those early days, very few bitcoin companies had thought much about design. Many products and services in the market were functional for early adopters, but not necessarily…
For years, I’ve been creating favicons as png files, and not with the real .ico files, mostly because there is no native support for .ico files in Photoshop. Easiest solution is to use a 32 x 32 px .ico/png file and let the browsers scale it, but the better solution would be to create an icon file with multiple resolutions. Creating the icon is a bit tricky and you need a specific tool for it.…