Andrea Buran’s Site ^5.0

Web animation can be so much more than just decoration, but only if we make it part of our design process. It can’t be a meaningful addition to the user experience if you don’t include it in the early conversations that define that experience.

For existing projects that already use animation, you can start with a motion audit to find all the instances and ways you’re currently using animation.

If you’re embarking on a new feature primarily because you’ve seen a competitor release something similar, then you probably haven’t thoroughly considered or even identified the problem you’re trying to solve.

[…] certain pieces too easily fall into favor and repeated use. They quickly become fix tropes of a specific mood or environment, so much so that eventually there is no room for mobility and experimentation.

[…] You’ll be asked to design things counter to goals. You’ll be asked to design according to whims. All those things will fail. And those failures will be on you. As a designer it’s on you to do the job to the best of your ability. Learn how to protect yourself by saying no.

[…] You are really good at what you do, and if you stay in the weeds on everything, you’ll keep things going perfectly, for a while. But eventually two things will happen. One, you will burn out. And two, you will eventually start to seriously piss off your team.

Why do products sometimes label things as my stuff, and sometimes label things as your stuff?

Refactoring is a second chance that most industries don’t get.

[…] and I realized that we’d stumbled onto one of the biggest problems in our entire company: we had no idea how to define the role we’re trying to hire for and grow our developers toward.

A re-invigorated broken employee is a corporation’s most powerful force.

Don’t make your (often shy) natural leaders ask for a promotion—just do it. The icing on the cake for you—as their manager—is the loyalty you’ll receive in return.

The problem is that if animation (and therefore the spatial structure of an interface) is an afterthought, it’s all too easy to create contradictory behaviors.

[…] the worst possible work environment is one in which visual designers are permitted actual autonomy over their domain.

Although handoffs are difficult to avoid completely, the more they happen the dumber an organization gets resulting in failure. Individuals who are are handed off work take longer to get up to speed through (relearning) and crucial knowledge is lost.

One day, you won’t buy a movie. You’ll buy the right to watch a movie, and that movie will be served to you. If the companies serving the movie don’t want you to see it, or they want to change something, they will have the power to do so.

You set the expectation that you’ll be making recommendations, not taking orders. You made it clear that you’ll be discussing and agreeing on ideas before anything gets refined.

The thing is, being connected doesn’t magically enable effective communication.

If you are embarking on a rewrite journey, all the power to you, but make sure you do it for the right reasons, understand the risks and plan for it.

Paradoxically, change only has a chance of succeeding if failure—at least a little bit of failure—is also okay.

Visual design should never be left until the end of the process.

[…] Still, seeing it isn’t the moment of resignation. The moment happened the instant you decided, “What the hell? I haven’t seen Don in months and it’d be good to see him.”

Your shields are officially down.

People under time pressure don’t work better—they just work faster.

Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide their mistakes.

Best I can tell, getting fired and dying are one of the few burdens that are yours and yours alone.

[…] More than 120 takes. Those kind of scenes, you say “Oh, Jackie’s good.” It’s not good. You can do it. Except do you have the patience or not?

[…] a claim to be pragmatic is implicitly an accusation that says that whoever disagrees is dogmatic […].

The dysfunction in the organization became the dysfunction in the product, and that was passed on to the customers.