Tuesday, May 30, 2023

the ol' juice

10 or so years ago, I was a big advocate for "Juicy" UI - interactions with just a splash of gratuitous kinesthetic pleasure.

I do suspect that was a little easier to achieve in the bad old jQuery days - adding an easing or extra animation to a specific action (as an adverb, so to speak) is more direct than setting up a CSS animation (which is more like working with adjectives) Especially for chaining multiple animations, where I think you still have to dip into JS.

But you still see signs of it - I love Material UI's react button that sends a sonar blip of color out from wherever you click it.

My project manager at work was talking about Rive, especially the delightful cat paw interaction (on hover) with the "Get Started" button at top.

It seems Rive's space is a bit closer to what used to be done in Flash - larger animations and fancier mini-cartoons - than jQuery, but still. That cats paw button is great!

General self-plug: if your company might be looking for a Boston-based UI dev (with midtier / whole-site background) for React/Typescript, and with an eye for the old "juiciness" and other ways of delighting users - I might be that guy! https://kirk.is/portfolio

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