Author
Rachel Nabors
Rachel Nabors is a web animation expert in Portland, Oregon. An invited expert at the W3C, she cultivates the community by curating WebAnimationWeekly.com and running the Animation at Work Slack community. She’s really good at helping companies wrangle UI animation and building new and unusual experiences.
Also from this author
Animations into our users’ visual systems and give them a cognitive speed boost. But which elements of our design benefit most from this new tool? In this excerpt from Rachel Nabors’s new book, Animation at Work, you’ll discover some core animation patterns, and learn how animation applies to a greater design system.
Consistent animation is crucial to both branding and UX. But because animation sits squarely at the intersection of design, development, and UX, achieving consistency presents unique communication challenges. Including animation in our style guides is a good place to start, but no “ultimate” animation style guide currently exists. Indeed, there may never be an animation-style-guide pattern that satisfies everyone. But Rachel Nabors maps out how we can create the ultimate animation documentation for our own teams.
Despite the rise and fall of Flash on the web, designing with animation has fiercely stirred us for decades. And yet nothing compares to its latest surge of evolution. Rachel Nabors lays out the array of tools and techniques that are fundamentally reframing our ideas about animation, and looks ahead to see where this path is taking us.
We use HTML to tell stories and communicate vast amounts of information—and animation helps us do both better. Just as hierarchy guides users through content, animation guides them through interactions by helping them understand relationships, structure, cause, and effect. Rachel Nabors explains her fascination with CSS3 animations, Canvas, SVG, the web audio API, webGL, and all the rest, and explains why we need web animation—and web animators.
