An Inside Look at Framer’s 2017

Here’s a recap of everything that happened with our product, company and community | Framer.com

Editor’s note: We’ve made some big changes to Framer, and this article refers to a deprecated tool. Learn more about what Framer is today →

A lot can happen in a year. For us, 2017 was a whirlwind, so it wouldn’t be surprising if you missed some of our biggest changes. We’ve already got lots planned for this year, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t catch you up to speed on everything that happened with the team, product and company last year.

Code is design is prototyping

• Our mission has always been to open up prototyping to anyone. Yet the code part of our tool presented a high barrier to entry for most folks. Last year, we leapt headfirst into reimagining our product to include a more accessible interface, one that most designers would intuitively grasp — a canvas.

• Separating design from code was a hard decision. In May, we began by formally splitting our product into two separate workspaces. Thanks to your qualitative and quantitative usage, we’re definitely getting closer to understanding the relationship between the two.
• Over a period of 6 months, we released Effects, Gradients, Dynamic Type and Exporting, all built to reimagine a better way to design. Beyond achieving parity with comparable tools, each new addition to the Design tab added up to make a huge difference in your workflow.

• Along the way, we also added better Handoff capabilities, allowing you to share production-ready code with your developers. Framer Cloud also got a serious update with Cloud Access, a dashboard and workflow that allows you to control exactly how your work is shared.

• The highlight of our year was the December 20th launch of a full vector editing toolkit, making Framer a feature-complete screen design tool.
• In a market oversaturated with design tools, it’s hard to convince people to make the switch. But Framer Design’s biggest differentiator is twofold: it’s an efficient design tool that helps you think about how elements of your product will interact, even as you’re designing them.

• So product-wise, we ended the year on a high note. Being named one of Fast Co. Design’s 14 Most Important Interfaces of 2017 was just icing on that cake.

Community

• Once again, our community blew us away with their passion and drive. In total, more than 50 Framer design events happened all over the world in 2017, from Sao Paolo and Seattle to Seoul, Sweden and beyond. But it’s our Framer community leaders and content creators who deserve special recognition.
• Seattle power designer duo Stephen and Jordan have not just set the standard for Framer meetups, but they also remain a source of inspiration and support for the greater community. Over in San Francisco David Politi and the Apogee team continue to lead the charge in hosting and mentoring.

• In Europe, we’re lucky to have Sergey, a great community leader, both online in the Framer Community Slack channel as well as offline for Framer London. And we’re pretty excited to have more dedicated lady designers on board, including Marie, who organized a Framer Codelab for Women at Google, and Silvia, who recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Framer Munich meetup group—all while finding time to support Framer events happening across Europe.
• Cordova, Pablo Stanley, Greg Rog (LearnUX), Chris Slowik (Designers.how) have all gone above and beyond in their dedication to creating educational video resources for our community. A special shoutout also goes out to Tes Mat for diligently keeping the Framerbook up to date in spite of all the constant product changes.
• With over 23K members and counting, the Framer Facebook group is a thriving community of truly inspiring and supportive individuals. Joining this group is still the #1 predictor of success in learning Framer.

Small wins, big changes and lessons learned

• Shipping fast and breaking things has gotten us far. In 2017 alone, we logged 28 updates, 15 launches, 10 new features releases, 2 revamped apps and 1 website redesign (launched from a castle in Belgium). While we’ll always be focused on putting things in your hands as soon as we build them, this next year will be all about finding a way to build more sustainable processes that balance team growth with product goals.
• Doubling in size meant that we suddenly needed a whole lot more process and structure. We kickstarted a new onboarding program for incoming hires, which included a buddy system and a process for empowering every employee to learn and teach Framer, regardless of their role within the company.
• One of the best parts of working at Framer is learning about the ways our tool is being used to prototype some of the products we use every day. Most recently, Twitter Threads, Facebook Watch Party and EA’s Battlefield game were designed using Framer. It’s also been exciting to see Framer take off in new markets like South Korea and China, as well as India, Brazil and South Africa.

• Last year we made the decision to move our blog over to Medium, inspired in part by the successes achieved by Basecamp’s similar move. The viral nature of this platform means that on average, 44% of traffic coming from Medium consisted of new users. But what we gained in discoverability, we lost in ownership and the ability to put our customer stories front and center. To solve for this, we launched Stories, a beautiful new page dedicated to the people and processes behind some of the world’s biggest products.

Room to grow

• In November of last year, Framer raised $7.7 million in Series A funding from Accel to ramp up product development, invest in design education and hire across every team.
• We’re also pretty excited to have onboarded some amazing teams onto Framer, including Pinterest, Netflix, Deliveroo, Victoria’s Secret, Lyft, Apple, Hulu, Airbnb, Goldman Sachs and more. Our product has evolved to accommodate teams as small as two and as large as Fortune 500s, so check out our new Teams page to find out how we can best support you.
• In 2017, we doubled in size and unsurprisingly, quickly outgrew our office space. Though we’ll be sad to leave our 17th century canal view, stoop life and cozy kitchen hangs, we’re very much looking forward to being able to spread out in our new digs — just a few blocks up the street! With over 4 floors, including an event space and lobby area, we’ll have more than enough room to grow our team.

On that note, we’re hiring for all levels of experience in design and engineering as well as sales, finance and ops. It’s a great time to join the Framer team, so if you’re interested in working with some of the best global talent and building a tool used by all the companies you know and love, check out our Careers page for more details.