Pixis wanted to give marketers a single place to compose, animate, and ship ad creatives — DAM access on the left, a Canvas-based editor in the middle, and a timeline on the bottom. I led the team from a blank repo to the first paying customer.
The editor
Built on raw Canvas plus a thin scene-graph layer. Tried Fabric.js first and bounced off the performance ceiling once we started layering animated text on top of high-resolution images. The custom path let us batch redraws and keep 60 fps with a dozen animated layers.
The timeline
Bezier curves over time, per property. Drag a handle and the easing updates live. We did not reach for Lottie because the source-of-truth had to round-trip back to the editor — Lottie's JSON output is one-way.
Team
Five engineers, two designers, one PM. I split the work along service boundaries — render, asset, render-server, auth — and we shipped the first usable build in twelve weeks.