Animation
Readymag Design Almanac is an educational project covering the fundamentals of design. This chapter covers web animation through the expertise of six designers and artists. They explain how to attract a viewer’s eye, reduce cognitive overload, and build visual hierarchies by applying motion.
Intro
John Schlemmer
Motion Designer at Google
Nicolas Ménard
Artist and animator director
Animation
Intro
Kostya Gorskiy
Design Manager at Intercom
Modern products seek to be lively and natural. Every touch of a button on a screen can tell a little story. Digital design, thus, is increasingly like music, literature and movie-making: its action develops over time, and becomes an interaction. Like the other arts, product design can contain a prologue, complications, development, climax, conclusion. It has tempo and rhythm, dynamics and lulls. Adventures may happen.
All of this is based on the fact that the non-digital world—in which humanity existed for 2.5 million years—is alive. It is always changing, always moving. And we, as humans, are programmed to respond to movement. Instinctively, we know what is alive and what is not, even out of the corner of our eye, when we are not looking intently. There is no way we can resist reacting to sudden movements; not so long ago, after all, it was a matter of survival.
For this chapter, the Readymag team discussed animation with a number of designers, developersand animators—about how the static becomes dynamic, how something dead becomes alive, and how art becomes less like artifice.
Animation
John Schlemmer
