How BUCK Built LinkedIn's First Year in Review, Entirely in Rive

At the end of 2025, LinkedIn launched something they'd never done before: a Year in Review. A personalized, animated experience that let every member see how they used LinkedIn that year (their highlights, their stats, their story). It was shareable. It was celebratory. And it was built entirely in Rive.

BUCK, the creative studio behind the project, just published a full case study breaking down how they pulled it off.

Image courtesy of BUCK

The scope

This wasn't a simple animation. It was a fully interactive, full-screen experience powered entirely by Rive. The Year in Review needed to:

• Pull in each user's real data and present it as a personalized experience

• Work across a wide range of mobile devices, including low-end Android

• Support three languages (English, Spanish, Portuguese)

• Feel cohesive and celebratory despite every user seeing something different

The result: 207,360 possible user journeys. Every combination of data, language, and device had to work.

Every user saw something different. See the full set in BUCK's case study.

Why Rive

The experience was completely modular and data-driven. Animations weren't pre-rendered videos or static screens. They were interactive, responsive to each user's unique statistics, and assembled in real time.

This is what Rive is built for. The editor lets you design and animate content that connects directly to data through Data Binding, and State Machines handle the logic that determines what plays and when. Designers and developers work in the same file. What gets built in the editor is what ships in the app.

Pre-rendering 207,360 variations as video would be impossible. Rive handles it as a single, data-driven file.

How it came together

BUCK and LinkedIn collaborated from the ground up across four workstreams: creative development, a modular design and animation system, and a substantial technical build in Rive. Our team was involved from kickoff through delivery, providing guidance and helping troubleshoot technical hurdles as they came up.

In BUCK's words: "This close collaboration with the makers of the tool gave us the confidence and technical clarity we needed to deliver on the full breadth of the project."

For the full behind-the-scenes breakdown (including process videos, design details, and credits), read BUCK's case study →

What this means for interactive content

LinkedIn's Year in Review joins Spotify Wrapped as one of the largest personalized experiences built with Rive. Together, these projects reached over a billion users at the end of 2025, running performantly across every device (including low-end Android phones).

The pattern is the same in both cases: take real user data, feed it into a rich animated experience, and ship it across every platform. No pre-rendered video. No platform-specific builds. One interactive file that responds to data and runs everywhere.

If you're thinking about building something similar (a personalized recap, a mini-game, an interactive report, a data-driven story), this is how it's done.

Read the full case study

BUCK's writeup includes behind-the-scenes videos, design details, and the full credits. Read it on buck.co →

Ready to build? The Rive editor is free to use →

Learn more:

• Rive Data Binding

• Rive State Machines

• How Spotify Wrapped 2025 was built with Rive