Direct

Direct is a tool that helps motion designers provide clear, precise motion direction for engineers.

As motion design becomes more and more prominent in apps, it’s becoming increasingly important to develop a standard for communicating direction from motion designers. Once an animation is finalized, simply handing off a video file to engineers makes it very difficult for them to recreate. Animations take a lot of engineering time to implement and there are a lot of subtleties that could get lost in translation. As designers, it’s our responsibility to make sure that engineers have everything they need to quickly recreate this motion.

Disclaimer: This is not an officially supported Google product.

Getting started

1. Install Google App Engine

2. Install node.js and npm

3. Install bower

npm install -g bower

4. Install dependencies

bower install

5. Populate config files

   Rename config_sample.yaml to config.yaml

   (this file can be left blank for most users)

   Rename app/js/config_sample.js to app/js/config.js

   Fill in values for window.__directConfig.stagingDomain and window.__directConfig.productionDomain if you intend to use staging and production environments. Otherwise, they can be left as empty strings.

6. Run a local instance

dev_appserver.py .

7. View the server at http://localhost:8080/