

APPLE DESIGN AWARDS
Animation for the iPad age
The groundbreaking animation app Looom was developed by two people, neither of whom consider themselves developers.
Eran Hilleli is an animator and filmmaker based in Tel Aviv, Finn Ericson an engineer and musician in Stockholm. “I never meant to be a coder or a developer – I would not hire myself as a coder,” laughs Hilleli.
But that non-traditional background might be what made Looom worthy of a 2020 Apple Design Award. The app brings the labourious process of hand-drawn animation into the iPad age: sketch with your finger or Apple Pencil, then swipe to bring up a new cel. What you drew earlier stays faintly visible, and with a handful of taps you can easily create simple, lively loops.

In fact, Looom was intended to be more of a playground than a problem solver. “It wasn’t about creating a tool that was missing,” Hilleli says. “Looom is kind of like a gym for your animation muscles.”
The story of that gym starts a few years ago, when Hilleli and Ericson met while working on a synthesiser project for Teenage Engineering, a Swedish audio electronics company. The two bonded and were soon developing Looom from their respective cities in their spare time.

“Finn comes from a family of artists, and he’s a multi-instrumental musician,” says Hilleli. “He just happens to have a Masters in computer science as well.”
That may be why Looom feels so much like playing an instrument. The app specialises in creating what Hilleli calls “weaving loops”, short abstract repeating animations. (Think of an arty GIF.) But don’t let the terminology frighten you: thanks to its intuitive, toy-like controls, Looom is designed for everyone.
“We wanted to dance on that line where it’s simple enough to be inviting for young people but special enough that advanced animators could find merits,” says Hilleli.

If Looom has a relaxed, welcoming vibe, that’s on purpose too, its design was inspired, in part, by the Etch A Sketch and the Game Boy. “There was no rush,” Hilleli says. “It all had to feel good.”
The end result, he says, feels better than he ever expected. “This is the first time I’ve seen people make things from a thing I made,” he says. “Knowing that I could help enable something like this is incredible.”
Download Looom on iPad.