To design great UI animation — the kind that has purpose and utility — animation has to be part of your design process from the start. That may sound like obvious advice, but it’s is a lesson I know I’ve learned the hard way more than once. 

An animation lesson learned the hard way: 
One that sticks in my mind is a web site project from a while back. We were a small team and we had animation ideas early on that we discussed from time to time, but we never storyboarded or prototyped any of it. We kept it as something we’d take care of later. 

As the project deadline came nearer we kept saying that we didn’t have time to dig into it right now, but we would definitely get to implementing those animation ideas later. 

I bet you can tell where this is going... 

None of our animation ideas made it into the final product. Budgets and timelines ran out, as they’re known to do, and we ran out of time. We had good intentions but we still treated animation like the icing on top, instead of an actual part of the design cake. 

Animation can’t be an important part of an interface if you don't treat is as an important part of the process. Lesson learned!

Getting more than “delight” from Disney's principles:
Speaking of learning things, I wrote an expanded version of What does Disney know about interface animation anyway? on Monday. If you missed it in the past issue or want to dig into more details, give it a read.


Now on to the links and resources!