Lyft goes open source

While most tech companies hoard data and patents, a small contingent are slowly open-sourcing internal tools to help the rest of the world design beautiful and accessible apps.

Just this weekend, Lyft's design team launched Colorbox, a design tool used to build accessible color systems. There are an estimated 285 million people in the world who are visually impaired – Colorbox makes it easy to design interfaces that anybody can interact with, not just those with 20/20 vision.

"Color is instrumental in how we perceive the world, and that could not be more true within interfaces. At Lyft, we believe in an inclusive future where anyone can pick up a product and be successful." – Kevyn Arnott

Lyft isn’t the only unicorn giving things away. Facebook published a collection free design resources. Uber released their distributed deep learning framework. Airbnb's design team open-sourced Lottie, a tool to add high-quality animations to any native app:

"In the past, building complex animations for Android, iOS, and React Native apps was a difficult and lengthy process. You either had to add bulky image files for each screen size or write a thousand lines of brittle, hard-to-maintain code. Because of this, most apps weren’t using animation — despite it being a powerful tool for communicating ideas and creating compelling user experiences." – Airbnb Design