We’re excited to share some BIG news for the Lightwell team! The team is joining Twitter to help work on the Conversations initiative. We have been long time passionate users of the product and after spending more time with the Twitter team, are incredibly energized to bring our experiences to further the broader mission of serving the public conversation.

Our team is so grateful for all your support as Lightwell creators over the years — it’s been an amazing ride. We could not have made it this far without our users, customers, investors, friends, and family. With your help, we built Lightwell into one of the most powerful design-to-production tools for mobile development.

We’re very happy to say that starting today: Lightwell is FREE to download and use!

What does this mean?

• You won’t need to login or have an account to use the tool, which means that you can layout, animate, prototype, and export to iOS without a subscription.
• All apps built with Lightwell will be completely unaffected. Any apps on the App Store can continue to be distributed without any change or updates. Any app currently being built can continue to be developed.
• We will no longer be actively supporting the tool or adding new features, but please continue to enjoy the power of design-to-development on iOS!

We have loved every minute of working on Lightwell, and hope that it helped you express your creativity on the mobile medium!

Love,

Team Lightwell 💕✨

Lightwell Team is Joining Twitter was originally published in Lightwell Pro on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re excited to announce a brand new Lightwell for professional mobile design and development!

This means that we’re focused solely on making Lightwell the best tool for designers to build high fidelity mobile prototypes that developers can implement with a few lines of code.

True designer-to-developer handoff 🎨📲

A visual tool for designers to prototype everything from layouts to animations. A native SDK for developers to access all design as native iOS elements.

A Few New Things

To better streamline the designer to developer workflow, there are a few things that we’ve released as beta features.

1:1 Design Import

We’ve been adding support for design files from Sketch and Figma in addition to Photoshop. This includes importing combined shapes, shadows, blurs, fills, and masks.

Just click on the ‘Import’ icon and select the Sketch file that you’d like to start with. For Figma, use the unique file key as described in this article. Each artboard imports as a separate screen in Lightwell.

Here’s an example of a food ordering app built in Lightwell from design to code. Download the Sketch source file, Lightwell File, and Xcode file here to try for yourself!

Dynamic Layouts

Designing for multiple devices and screen sizes is quick and easy with dynamic layouts. You can make your entire screen layout responsive with just a few clicks.

Under Layer Controls, each layer has a layout section that lets you create a set of constraints to calculate the position and size of all the views in the screen. Each layer can be pinned to the screen or to a parent layer.

All the dynamic layouts you set up on your layers will automatically be exported with your layers properties for developer handoff. This means that developers don’t need to programmatically create Auto Layout Constraints in Xcode anymore. 👍

Animation Spring Timing

Animations take a curve that describe the type of animation. You can use pre-defined curves like ‘linear’ or ‘ease-in’, custom bezier curves and now, spring animations! Just in time for spring! 😉

A timing curve gives you control over the velocity at which layers animate over the duration of the animation. However it’s almost impossible to simulate a realistic elastic spring-like animation with basic timing functions.

The new ‘Spring’ timing lets you implement a realistic spring-like animation, that the SDK translates into animations using CAMediaTimingFunction. For fun, this is what our developers used to use to manually code timing curves. 👀

Lightwell SDK

The Lightwell SDK provides programmatic access to designs created in the Lightwell editor. After setting up a project in Lightwell, you can click on the ‘Export’ icon on the top right of the window to get:

• Folders of *Assets* (all sliced images, screen data, etc.)
• The *LightwellKit* framework

This asset package includes layers, layouts, and animations as assets that a developer can access and use in a completely new or preexisting iOS app.

Here are some examples of how you can use the SDK in an app. ⬇️

You’ll also notice that we’ve updated our version numbers, so all of our previous versions will be rebased to “0.x” as we work towards our launch of Lightwell v1.0 this year.

Make sure to update to Lightwell: Version 0.6. If you don’t see an automatic update reminder, you can “Check for Updates” in your main menu.

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Design Tool, Meet Developer SDK was originally published in Lightwell Pro on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

#LightwellinAction is a monthly roundup of the newest features 🥳

It’s been a busy quarter for the team at Lightwell, and we’re excited to dive into some of the latest features with you! In our last post, we talked about our vision to enable a more streamlined workflow for designers and developers building amazing mobile experiences.

The first step in doing that is supporting design file import and making that experience as butter smooth as possible, so without further ado…

Sketch & Figma Import (Beta)

Today, we’re releasing a fast and easy way to import your designs from Sketch and Figma. All your beautiful designs are now only a couple clicks away to building them into Lightwell.*

*Both file imports support custom vectors, combined shapes, gradients, shadows, blurs, nested symbols and overrides. All things vector-related are supported. Custom text fonts and components coming soon!

Screen Transitions

Adding screen transitions is now as easy as adding an animation to a layer. In your Actions section, you can select “Transition” and choose from Slide, Push, and Fade transitions between screens.

Each transition can be further customized with direction, time duration, and timing curves. With this in place, designers can create powerful screen transitions effortlessly.👌

If you want to see for yourself, download the included Sample Project and check out how we set up a screen transition that fades right into a new screen animation on load.

Scroll Views ↔️↕️

Scroll views is a feature in Lightwell that allows you to, well, scroll. Using your settings correctly, you can make it scroll in any direction you want.

Once you know what layers you want to be scrollable, you can create a scroll in two simple steps:

1. Group layers that you want in your scroll view ✔️
2. Check ‘Make Scroll Area’ in your Layer Controls ✔️

That’s it! To make your scroll content behave the way you want, you can edit the scroll area to the right of your canvas.

A couple of things that are already built in: Overdrag (when you can drag the scroll’s content too farther than the boundary) and Bounce (a bounciness that automatically brings your content back to the original position).

Linear Path Animation

Animations have always been one of the powerhouse features in Lightwell. They are especially useful when creating micro-interactions and high fidelity animations on a particular layer instead of just screen-to-screen animations.

With the latest release, you can create position animations as linear or curved paths right on your canvas. Each keyframe has control point handles to change the curvature path of each animation.

💡 Double clicking on the keyframe control points switch between curve handles and linear path animations.

What’s Next

We have even more exciting news for you in the coming weeks! *ahem ahem* Developer access to designs via SDK, anyone? Be the first one to hear about new features and updates by following us on twitter @lightwellpro!🐤

We can’t wait to see the amazing things you build, and help you bring your ideas to life on mobile. If you have any questions or run into any issues when using Lightwell, please let us know! We’d love to hear from you. 💌

Make sure to update to the newest version of Lightwell: Version 5.5. If you don’t see an automatic update reminder, you can always “Check for Updates” in your main menu.

Until next time Lightwellers! Happy Creating! ✨

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Sketch & Figma Import, Screen Transitions, and Scroll Views was originally published in Lightwell Pro on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Learn how University of Lethbridge created a cross-disciplinary course for students to build educational apps for children.

Part of our #SpotlightSeries In Lightwell Education 🎒👩‍🏫 💻 🍏

With Lightwell’s background in children’s media (via The Adventures of Pan), University of Lethbridge’s (ULETH) educators approached Lightwell with an idea to create a new course about Creating Children’s Media. They were looking for a tool that made app creation and the handoff process easier for a team to collaborate with. The new course gave students an opportunity to work together in mini product pods, similar to app development in professional settings.

This cross-disciplinary approach consisted of New Media, Computing Science, Digital Audio Arts and Education majors working together to build an educational app for K-12 classroom. Professor Steed and Harper-Brown wanted their students to implement design thinking principles to build their app.

This course will involve brainstorming, designing instructional and technical aspects of the app, developing a prototype, and field testing with representatives of the target audience.

Both Professor Steed and Harper-Brown modeled the course to create a finished app in 12 classes. During the development process, the University partnered with local elementary schools for teams to conduct user experience and get feedback from their target audience — kids!

“Lightwell provided our students a user-friendly way of developing educational apps. This was a great tool because our students were not required to learn an involved programming language but were still successful in developing simple apps. It was a perfect match with our course. The University students took their apps out to 3 local elementary schools for field testing and the elementary students were quite engaged with those apps. It was interesting that a couple of the school teachers expressed interest in having their elementary students develop Lightwell apps.” — Professor Marlo Steed

For more information, Explore the course outline created by Professor Steed and Harper-Brown.

Questions about Lightwell in Education? Email us at teachers@lightwell.pro or visit us here!

University of Lethbridge Students Build Educational Apps with Lightwell was originally published in Lightwell Pro on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A year ago, we released Lightwell with a distinct goal in mind: to give creatives more control over their finished products. In a perfect world, design elements would translate directly to production-ready outputs. Developers would be able to build on top of designs and prototypes. Streamlining the production handoff from creatives to developers (or removing it completely) was the unexplored frontier in creative software. The tool to accomplish this was missing. For this reason, we approached Lightwell as a production tool first and a design tool second.

Today, we are much closer to achieving true production handoff. The release of Lightwell 5.0 introduced visual programming and enabled creators to add working logic in their apps without previous knowledge of code. The line between designing an idea and building a product is disappearing.

In the newest version of Lightwell, we improve on the new visual programming interface as well as introduce some familiar design features. Without further ado, here’s Lightwell Version 5.2!

New & Improved Editor Interface

The first thing you will notice in the new Lightwell UI is that your panels are on both sides of the canvas instead of stacked vertically on the left. This change was made to improve the usability of both your Element Panels (on the left) and Control Panels (now on the right). For creators with complex scenes containing many Layers, Actions, and Interactions, the additional space will feel more intuitive.

Both panels have also been completely redesigned to improve readability and speed up the workflow. Some highlights include: inline alignment settings, direct asset links, device-specific positions, and interaction alerts on layers and actions. Panel sections are also collapsible, so the only information on screen is the information you actually need.

Get in on the Action

As part of the interface update, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for designers to get started creating in Lightwell. To achieve this, we simplified our menus to only high-level elements.

For those of you already familiar with how Animations and Audio work, it won’t surprise you that we combined them into a new section called Actions.

Actions 🎬 🔈

For Lightwell first-timers, Actions are distinct effects that can be triggered (and reused) on a screen. In other words, all Animations and Audio (including music, sound effects, and dialogue) are Actions.

These Actions are standalone effects that happen, but can only happen when you trigger them in Interactions. You can use any of the 9️ triggers to “Play” an Action, and Actions can be tied to as many triggers as you like.

Portrait Mode

From day one, creators have asked us for portrait mode support in their app development process. We heard you and we’re happy to announce that it’s finally here! When you create a new screen in the App Overview, you have the option to choose screen orientation. You also have the ability to edit the current orientation of your existing screens when you hover over screen thumbnails. Want your menu screen in portrait mode but the rest of your app in landscape mode? Done!

It’s also easy to preview screens in portrait mode for both iPhone and iPad apps. No matter what orientation, your options are a click away.

Zoom, Swoosh 🔍👟

The canvas now supports zooming and panning.

By default, Lightwell canvas functions use Multi-Touch gestures on your Mac. What does that mean for you, as a designer with at least two fingers*?

🤟Zoom: Pinch with two fingers to zoom in or out.

✌️Pan: Swipe in any direction with two fingers to pan around.

*If you only have one finger, you can click the ➖/➕ to zoom.

Contextual Interactions

One of our primary goals has always been to make Lightwell fast and intuitive for creatives to build production-ready interactive experiences. With the launch of visual programming in Interactions, we enabled designers to build working logic in their products without touching a line of code. 💪

This interface allows designers to flex muscles both as visual thinkers and systems thinkers.

In this Lightwell version, we aimed to strike a better balance between simplicity and power in the interface. The ability to program with logic flows provides power to the designer and the visual canvas gives them context and ease-of-use. This interface allows designers to flex muscles both as visual thinkers and systems thinkers.

Now you can view triggered layers on your canvas as you add interaction logic. It’s important to see the effects of your effects! 🤳

Wait Timer

With the new logic interface also comes new logic capabilities. Along with Play, Go To, and Set, we’ve added a “Wait” timer in Interactions. This lets you add an x second pause between effects. ⏱️

Coming Soon

The improvements we’ve been making to Lightwell are the tip of the iceberg. Digital products and experiences in our world are changing at lightning speed and our goal is to accelerate that pace.

For the creators who want to build native apps from end-to-end, Lightwell currently exports their designs to self-contained Xcode projects. But what about the creators who hand off their designs to developers? We’ll soon be releasing a native API that loads full screens, including assets, layouts, actions and logic — with a few lines of code. This design-to-development handoff will enable true “production prototyping” and streamline the creative workflow for all native experiences.

We’re excited to hear what you think of the latest features and even more excited for what’s coming.

Make sure to update to the newest version of Lightwell: Version 5.2. If you don’t see an automatic update reminder, you can always “Check for Updates” in your main menu.

Until next time Lightwellers! Happy Creating! ✨

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Portrait Mode, Actions, and a new look for Lightwell was originally published in Lightwell Pro on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s been a busy month with updates released every week! Since our last update (which introduced Chromebook compatibility, Editor previewing, a new Warning System, and more ⚡), we’re excited to share a few new features up our sleeves.

New: Shapes

Layers now support custom shapes and colors. This means you can add colored shapes to fill backgrounds (save on app file size!), which is a common optimization concern when creating image heavy apps like stories or games. Shapes also scale up and down without pixelation, so you can create a shape layer once and use it throughout your app.

Artists can create and use shapes in Lightwell, knowing that it will make their finished apps more efficient and beautiful.📲

The benefit of using Shape and Text Layers is that they have a minimal footprint on your final app size while Image Layers are dependent on the size of your image assets.

Artists can create and use shapes in Lightwell, knowing that it will make their finished apps more efficient and beautiful. 📲

Building support for our shape engine allowed us to replace the canvas layer outlines with dynamic shapes. This gave us a good testing ground for shapes, better control of the appearance, as well as the added benefit of improving overall performance of the canvas. Faster canvas speeds also makes connectivity to your iOS device smoother for previewing. Double 👍!

Pro Tip: You can drag images directly onto the canvas.

Creating Animations

Introducing a new and easier way to create animations on the canvas. With Lightwell, you can edit keyframes for custom animations without leaving your scene.

The new interface is 💯 for creating animations quickly and intuitively on your canvas, without needing to switch contexts.

Here’s a rundown of the three new animation interfaces: Rotation, Opacity and Scale. Similar to Position animation, the keyframes and handles are directly on the canvas for you to edit.

Rotation

We’ve added rotation handles right on your layers which makes creating rotation animation much easier. 😂
Start by picking an anchor point, then slide to a degree angle and see your layers rotate in real-time. 🔄

Opacity

Want to create transparency in your animations? So do we!The new opacity slider edits alpha values for multiple keyframes.

You get the granularity of selecting the exact opacity values while also seeing the visual effect on your layers.

Scale

With the scale animations, you can see how your layers scale in your scene. The new scale handles means no more guesswork needed (especially with multi-keyframe animations).

Note: The keyframe handle is the farthest corner from the layer’s anchor point.

Editing Multiple Animations

The animation manager can also display multiple animations at once, allowing ease of editing and timing.

The new interface is 💯 for creating animations quickly and intuitively on your canvas, without needing to switch contexts.

Audio Events

Lightwell now lets any audio event trigger animations, audio and navigation. This means your dialogue, music, and sound effects can lead to an infinite number of interactive possibilities!

Make sure to update to the newest version of Lightwell. If you don’t see an automatic update reminder, you can always “Check for Updates” in your main menu.

Until next time Lightwellers! Happy Creating! ✨

—

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Shapes, Animations and Audio in Lightwell was originally published in Lightwell Pro on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When we released Lightwell last year, we set out to empower creators to make interactive content without touching a single line of code. The foundation of our mission was built on better creative tools — tools that could enable creatives to develop finished products, make their own apps and ultimately, take their work further.

The evolution of storytelling paired with the advancement of new hardware technologies will open up a new world of interactive content; one that will be powered by more accessible software tools and platforms. That’s why we’re excited to share what we’ve built these past few months.

Introducing a newer, faster and more accessible Lightwell 😁

Lightwell is now available on Chromebook!

Cross Platform Creation

Lightwell was originally built for Mac OS because of our roots building the Pan Series as native interactive story apps for the Apple App Store. 🐼However as we’ve seen hardware preferences expand, it was important to build a tool that would be accessible for a wider community, from creative professionals to hobbyists to student creators.

This was a particularly fun technical challenge for our team and we’re one of the first to get Swift running on Android x86. The same codebase that drives Lightwell’s canvas and controls runs on on both Mac and Android, meaning cleaner code and faster deployment of new features. This also gets us one step closer to deployment on ARM and all Android systems next.

Ease of Extensibility

The other half of accessibility is the extensibility of our framework to publish to new platforms, allowing creators to reach wider audiences. This meant rebuilding our visual engine in order to give creators more fine-grain control of their content no matter where they publish to.

We migrated our core rendering pipeline over to OpenGL a few months back, and this is the proof of concept that our “HSK” Hullabalu Story Kit can plug in and publish to even more platforms. Here’s to a future where creators can build once in Lightwell’s visual tool, and export to any native mobile platform.

What does this mean for creators?

• Chromebook compatibility — Lightwell is now available on Chromebooks as an Android app download. Even the lightest machines can create the same beautiful, complex experiences that were previously only possible on a Mac. Download it on Google Play.👈
• Editor Previewing — We’ve added desktop previewing in the Editor so you no longer need a mobile device to test apps before publishing. Switching between ‘editing’ and ‘previewing’ states is super simple, and even smoother if your computer doubles as a tablet like many of the hybrid touch device machines out there. Feel free to ask yourself: What is a computer? What is a tablet? What is a week-end? 💻📲

• Warning System — A warning system is now in place to help catch issues, fix broken links or remove unused assets. It’s an easy way to do creative “product debugging” on projects and make your app production-ready. Visual debugging beats code debugging any day of the week.👾
• Alignment—Layers can be aligned in all directions and distributed evenly with a simple selection. You’ll also see alignment lines appear as you edit and move layers on the Canvas. 📐
• Copy, Paste & Auto Saving —You can now Command+C / V all of your layers, interactions, animations and audio across scenes in your project. Create something once, use it everywhere, and it’s automatically saved for future editing.✂️

Coming Soon

This version is a big step towards empowering even more people to create interactive experiences. While we continue to develop support for more platforms, we’re also looking to expand the types of experiences and products that can be built in Lightwell. This includes enabling interaction logic and variables in an intuitive visual interface. More to come on this!

We’re grateful to the many customers and creators that have helped us understand your creation process, and look forward to continuing to build Lightwell for you! 🙌

Make sure to update to the newest version of Lightwell. If you don’t see an automatic update reminder, you can always “Check for Updates” in your main menu.

Until next time Lightwellers! Happy Creating! ✨

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Hello, Lightwell for Chromebook was originally published in Lightwell Pro on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’re excited to announce a new beta program between artists and Lightwell: The Lightwell Artist Fellowship.

It’s something that we’ve wanted to do for a while, and we’re proud of the first group of artists we’re fortunate enough to work with: Bart, Liv, Meeta, Greg and Michelle.

Each artist hails from a different walk of life (and world!) and has a unique story they want to tell.

Why we care

Our mission is to empower creators. We’re doing that with tools that give them more ownership and independence in the content creation process. Initially, these tools were built to enable our in-house creative team, but we’re more excited than ever to put these powerful tools in the hands of a new generation of artists, designers, illustrators and storytellers.

Sometimes, new mediums inspire new stories, and we can’t wait to collaborate with our first class of fellows to create theirs.

How it works

Over the course of the next 6 weeks, we’ll work closely with five incredibly talented artists as their build their first ever app on the Lightwell platform.

The Fellowship also includes weekly group video chats to review work, expert advice, access to Lightwell software and the product team behind it.

Keep an eye out for more to come!

Until next time, happy creating ✨💕
Team Lightwell

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The Lightwell Artist Fellowship was originally published in Lightwell Pro on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Mister Locke-a-Lightwell
My name is Mister Locke-a-Lightwell
And there’s a million things I haven’t built
But it’s not too late, it’s not too late”
- Mister Locke-a-Lightwell

Meet Lightwell

When we released our first story app at Hullabalu 4 years ago, we set out to reimagine the future of storytelling. After years of building our own story apps, we’re releasing Lightwell, our most valuable IP.

Lightwell is the first software that empowers creators to make fully interactive, animated mobile apps without writing a single line of code.

It allows anyone to make interactive native iOS apps straight out of art assets (there’s even a handy Photoshop script to export your layers directly into Lightwell).

As with many tools that get built, the idea was inspired out of need.

Early on, creating for new mediums is inefficient and costly. When we first started making our Pan story apps, the timelines looked quite different than they do now. Without Lightwell, our first app took 9 months, and the second took 6 months. With Lightwell, the most recent app took 1 week to build.

For anyone who wants to make high-quality interactive apps like our award-winning Pan apps, now you can in Lightwell. You reduce time to ship interactive content from 4 months to 1 week AND you don’t have to write a line of code.

The process is not only faster, the product is leaner. Our initial story app was 23,252 lines of code. Building an app in Lightwell is now 19 lines of code (17 of which are Xcode boiler plate).

This is what code for an app looked like before Lightwell:

An app built in Lightwell now looks like this:

New Mediums, New Tools

We’re in a golden age of content creation. New platforms exist to empower writers, artists, and storytellers like never before. You can publish an article to thousands on Medium, make a meme on Giphy, build a site on Squarespace and accept payments that day with Stripe. Looking around the landscape, it’s easy to find an endless array of technology and tools for creators to share ideas on the web. The same cannot be said for mobile, yet.

Creating apps with Lightwell accomplishes the unicorn trifecta of mobile development. We’ve reduced time to build, reduced cost to build, and improved overall quality. Without it, creators would spend the same amount of time that we did initially, building and iterating in lines of raw code rather than an intuitive visual GUI.

The interface we designed to create interactive content is wholly unique to Lightwell. You can create custom actions across layers, build sequential touch interactions, utilize device motion, and auto-sync audio to dialogue — all with simple controls instead of code.

First it becomes possible, then it becomes so cheap that anyone can do it… and that’s when it gets interesting. — Hilary Mason

Software has been eating the world for some time. New tools and platforms make it easier to do things that were traditionally harder and more expensive. Technology drives these evolutions across industries, first in hardware and then in software. The iPhone hit the market 10 years ago; the iPad was introduced 7 years ago. Yet, we’re still skimming the surface of storytelling on mobile.

Distribution vs. Engagement

In the world of storytelling, there have been two distinct stages of evolution: 1) distribution and 2) engagement.

If we rewind back to the first story ever told, that 1-on-1 experience was likely very engaging. Inherently high touch, but low distribution. That’s why the first stage in the evolution of storytelling began — people built early technology to reach larger audiences more quickly and cheaply and increase distribution. The Gutenberg Revolution, Sholes typewriter and first websites were exciting advances towards the widespread distribution of content. However, focusing solely on dissemination dulled engagement with the content; and over time, storytelling became more passive, rather than active (or in this case, interactive).

That brings us to the second and current stage in the evolution of storytelling. This stage is focused on higher engagement, while maintaining wide distribution capabilities. We’re still in the first decade of interaction-enabling hardware, fueled by the prevalence of smartphones, touch tablets, VR headsets, and other connected devices. We expect more supporting software like Lightwell to follow.

What’s To Come

Lightwell is a natural extension of the framework we built internally to decouple code from content. It’s been a long time coming — the ability to fully separate content from code and deliver unlimited interactions or what we call “streaming interactive content on demand” (SICOD). We believe SICOD is going to fundamentally change how interactive content is built, delivered, and consumed.

Imagine being able to stream unlimited interactive content the way we currently stream video on Netflix. What about interacting with photos, videos and ads on our newsfeed instead of just passively scrolling through them?

It’s a bright future for the next generation of creators, and we believe powerful creative tools are the foundation for the interactive medium. Higher touch experiences are around the corner, ones that go deeper, are more interactive, and more responsive than their predecessors.

Calling All Creators

After many months of building, testing, and creating, we’re releasing Lightwell for all creators. It’s the most powerful tool for interactive app creation, whether you’re an individual artist or a creative team. If you want to see for yourself, you can download Lightwell directly here.

We’re seeking artists, designers, and storytellers to build the future of interactive content with us. In the words of Locke Lightwell, inventor extraordinaire: it’s not too late, it’s not too late. We believe it’s just right.

You can get started here: lightwell.pro :)

Introducing Lightwell…and the Future of Interactive App Creation was originally published in Lightwell Pro on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our guiding principles

Completing the final book in the epic adventure of a fearless purple panda resulted from a team effort supported by illustrators, animators, engineers, writers, and team members who doubled as voice actors. The company was founded on the mission of ushering in a new era of storytelling, one that engages kids and enriches their development in new and delightful ways, and we are proud of the foundation we created.

We’re also humbly aware of the long-term nature of this vision. For us, it feels like the first inning of a new paradigm of kid’s engagement and interaction with the digital world. As we look to build the future, we rely on a primary relationship between content and technology.

Story is King

The first component of this relationship is the content. In the world of Hullabalu, our guiding light is the story. We wake up every day driven by a connection to our characters with a deeply-held respect for their challenges and emotional battles, understanding that kids learn and develop through these same emotional connections.

Creating this dynamic for children is exponentially more difficult today than at any other point in human history given the high velocity of information kids process and different methods through which they consume it. In a world of smartphones, tablets and augmented reality, the magic of storytelling must evolve with the way children engage with the world and our team of engineers and designers are leaders driving this evolution.

Engineering the Future

With one adventure series released and a new anthology series underway, we have been thinking about new ways to push our technology further. Imagine new technology unlocking and animating 1000’s of years of one dimensional content and guiding the next generation of entertainment and education. This is a future that we believe is present and that our product team iterates relentlessly towards.

Internally we call our solution to this underlying technical challenge Pegasus, and it allows us to bring any story to life in weeks. Once created, kids don’t just read our stories, they touch and manipulate them. By observing their natural actions, we improve and update our stories in real time. We have already collected billions of engagement data points from kids playing with just Pan. Imagine the vast well of engagement knowledge as stories powered by Hullabalu grow by an order of magnitude.

What’s Next

At Hullabalu, we’re incredibly excited to sit at the apex of content creation and consumption. Our next few years are focused on bringing the scalability of what we’ve built to the entire publishing industry and enabling a much broader movement to take hold.

We also remain steadfastly committed to our original content and stories and can’t wait to bring you more experiences from the Pan family. This is a bright time for lovers of people and their stories, and it’s about to get much brighter!