Tom Ginnattasio

Tom leads the product design team at InVision

Studio. He spent his early years as a designer

working for Apple, Oracle, MIT, and Twitter.

attasi.com

I grew up using Flash, which was at least a decade, maybe two, ahead of its time in terms of delivering rich interactive content for the web. It gave us video long before the web was ready to support it. Just recently, in the past couple of years, we’re seeing technology like JavaScript and CSS catching up to what Flash could do.

Back when I started, 20 years ago, animation on the web was absurd. It was ridiculously animated GIFs, people trying to make their site really fancy. What’s happened over the past five years or so is that we’re becoming more mature with animation on the web. We’re realizing animation is about designing with time, and time can be a really powerful piece of user experience. It connects one screen to another, helps users grasp the content they’re consuming, and helps build a geography of the application, so users understand where they’re at spatially.

The web design market has become extremely fragmented over the past five or six years. Designers really started to mature, moving to different tools to cobble together a robust workflow. They have Sketch, their primary tool, then they use After Effects to do animation; folks on the other end of this spectrum are using tools like Keynote to do animation. It’s really varied and creates a disjointed workflow. Switching back and forth between Sketch and After Effects is time-consuming and, at the end, you still don’t have something you can go out and test with real users. We’ve seen the same problem with freelancers who are just trying to crank out better projects for their clients up to really large enterprise clients who make constant iterations. So we saw it as a really big opportunity for the entire industry and created InVision Studio.

If I had to point to one of the most
influential animators I’d say Walt Disney. He basically invented the entire practice, which his team grew from almost nothing.

I would rather entertain and hope that people learned something than educate people and hope they were entertained. Walt Disney

Cinderella

Walt Disney, 1950

Walt Disney talks creating Carousel of Progress

Disney.com, 1964

Back in the day they were doing things by hand that are still incredible. Something like

Cinderella, which was created more than

half a century ago, is still a beautiful example of animation. Disney literally wrote the book on animation: The Illusion Of Life.

It laid out principles we still use today.