For your company and your products, your logo, packaging, and the impression you make via search engines and digital channels are the first things that clients and consumers will register. Controlling your brand image is linked to your success, and a polished professional look is vital. Design needs today aren't restricted to graphic design - they also include effective website and UX/UI design.
I have to start with Bill Belichick. I promise I won't linger on that washed-up piece of driftwood for very long, but he serves as a useful, if minor, example. Here is Bill Belichick's official website. It's a terrible website. The design is so old that I half expected a pop-up alert telling me that I needed to download Flash. And the copy is so weak (example: "In 2000, Belichick led the Patriots to 20 winning seasons") that Belichick's weird-ass girlfriend probably wrote it herself.
Ambient animations are the kind of passive movements you might not notice at first. However, they bring a design to life in subtle ways. Elements might subtly transition between colours, move slowly, or gradually shift position. Elements can appear and disappear, change size, or they could rotate slowly, adding depth to a brand's personality. In Part 1, I illustrated the concept of ambient animations by recreating the cover of a Quick Draw McGraw comic book as a CSS/SVG animation.
Creating motion can be tricky. Too much and it's distracting. Too little and a design feels flat. Ambient animations are the middle ground - subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. Unlike timeline-based animations, which tell stories across a sequence of events, or interaction animations that are triggered when someone touches something, ambient animations are the kind of passive movements you might not notice at first. But, they make a design look alive in subtle ways.
At some point, I think all web designers circle around to the thought that if design software was only more like the web itself that it would be better for it. We would gain efficiency in that there may not need be much translation at all between design and the finished product. Time and quality suffer during the translation required now.
Parallax is a design pattern where webpage elements move at different speeds during scrolling, creating a layered, three-dimensional effect. Initially reliant on JavaScript, a recent CSS-only method has emerged, allowing smoother, non-blocking animations.
When converting HTML to WordPress themes, excessive WordPress indices add numerous CSS classes that conflict with the original HTML layout and design, necessitating solutions to manage these classes.
You wait 3 seconds. The last word fades out and a new one fades in: I call this design pattern The Wheel of Nothing: a rotating list of audience segments meant to impress through inclusion and draw attention through motion... for absolutely no reason.
