I’ve seen two guides posted to Medium about animation in the last month that have seriously blown up!
- Taras Skytskyi’s The ultimate guide to proper use of animation in UX
- Jonas Naimark’s Motion design doesn’t have to be hard
There is a lot to learn in each one! The demonstration animations they use are wonderfully well done and each guide demonstrates an interesting and effective animation technique, often paired next to a less successful technique to drive the point home. They are both heavily focused on Material Design though, which is fine, but I think Val Head said it best:
Google wrote material design for branding Google things. When you use material design on things that aren’t Google, you’re kind of using Google’s branding on a thing that is not Google, and that’s weird. Material design is Google’s opinion on motion. It’s Google’s branding opinion on motion. It’s not a de facto standard of how motion should happen.
I agree with that snippet from Val Head to a point. It depends, I think, on the application you use material design for. If you’re designing a personal site or a site for a client then you want to portray theirs or your brand in the design. But, if the design is for your own personal use or not for public viewing, material design can be useful for ease of use and as a clear way to display information.
I personally have used concepts from material design to get ideas for visual hierarchy and clarity, but I’d rather produce my own style, it may not be as complete or as sophisticated as something like material design, but I like to think the process of creating something is just as important as the outcome.