Can you sing? Even if you sound like a gargling crow, I bet you can still tap out some kind of rhythm. That’s the difference between animation, especially in UX, and drawing. UI Animation is all about the timing, plus understanding a few basic principles.

In the last year, the toolscape of UI development has bloomed with new animation tools that vastly simplify development.

Until recently, delivering animation in a user interface was the most painful kind of designer-developer handoff. An expert user of a major design tool crafted an animation. Then one of two things happened. Either that animation was plonked on a screen as an isolated movie or gif, or a developer was tasked with manually converting it into low-level drawing calls.

This talk includes a brief overview of animation but focuses on practical ways to simply animate elements of your UI to add more fun and user hinting.

Tools covered are mainly code-generation tools which go straight from visual animation design to usable code. This closes the gap between designer intention and delivery. Even better, they make animation in UX feasible for developers lacking the luxury of design experts.

Andy is Founder & CEO of Touchgram, a messaging platform for adding more delight into your digital relationships. He’s a life-long Chinese martial artist & programmer for the same 35+ years. As a technical dev in a mining town, he’s worked on international products ranging from CAD to 3D stereo movies. He’s often been a (very) remote team member from home in Perth, Western Australia. This includes a fun 2 years for Realm mobile database’s Danish Xamarin team. Naturally a toolsmith, inspired by the Montessori motto “help me to do it for myself”, his first startup was C++ dev tools in the 90’s. He’s now focused on creativity tools for a wider audience, starting with iMessage & with a broad ambition to help connect scattered families.

Anyone can Animate, even if they Can’t Draw