Animation
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April 27, 2023
Things that move without going anywhere
Animation practice · Abstract shapes & colour
Julian M.
Digital Designer
The first time I made something move, really move, not just slide in from the left like every UI transition I'd ever built, I stayed with it for a long time. The shape wasn't doing anything useful. It wasn't revealing information or guiding attention. It was just breathing. And that felt like enough.
Animation in design is almost always in service of something else. It explains, it guides, it confirms. What I've been exploring in my own practice is what animation is when you take away the job. When the movement is the thing, not the carrier of the thing.
Abstract shapes are the right material for this. A rectangle has no story. A circle carries no narrative weight. When you animate them, let them drift, contract, rotate slowly into themselves, you're left with pure visual sensation. Tension. Ease. The feeling of something alive.
"I wanted to know what colour does when it moves. Not what it means what it does."
Colour is different when it can't hold still
Static colour theory teaches you about harmony and contrast, about warm and cool, about the psychological associations built up over centuries of use. All of that is true and useful. But it assumes the colour is sitting there, waiting to be looked at.
When colour moves, it picks up qualities it doesn't have at rest. A slow-drifting coral shape feels warm in a way that the same shape pinned to a canvas doesn't quite capture. Two shapes crossing paths for a moment, their colours briefly occupying the same space, creates something that neither colour would produce alone. I've started thinking of these as colour events rather than colour choices.
Duration is a design decision too
In UI animation, timing is measured in milliseconds because it has to be invisible. The interaction should feel instant even when it isn't. That constraint is interesting to work with, but it means you almost never get to think about time as a material in itself.
In abstract animation, duration becomes expressive. A shape that takes twelve seconds to complete a single rotation feels meditative. The same shape rotating in two seconds feels anxious. Nothing else has changed, same colour, same form, same trajectory. Just the relationship to time. That relationship is something I've been studying carefully, because I think it informs how I'll eventually use time in more functional work too.
"Easing curves are the handwriting of motion. Two animators can use the same keyframes and produce completely different emotional experiences."
I came to this practice because I wanted to understand motion more deeply than client briefs allow. What I keep finding is that abstract animation is really a study in attention, in what draws the eye, what releases it, what holds it without demanding anything in return. Those are the same questions a good designer asks about any composition. The shapes just happen to be moving.
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