Implementing Animations On Mobile

Key Takeaways

[Music] I think one of the most painful thing as a designer is to spend a lot of time and energy working on a project creating a beautiful design with you know subtle interaction and animation and then you hand over your design to the client or a developer and when you see the final result you're like ah this is not what I was planning and it just looks horrible and you are feeling kind of ashamed to even show this to your friends or your colleagues because you don't feel proud of and you just feel like the developer completely ruined your dream design and I think this happens to everyone and it's super super frustrating but obviously this is part of our job right now at least in you know mobile apps I think this is a huge problem we're doing beautiful animations but we have to hand them over to developers to execute them we can't we don't have a tool right now to allow us to completely do the animation and hand over readymade code or animation for development we have to rely on other people to actually do the work for us now in web the situation is a bit different because tools like webflow are super awesome you can create already the interaction and all the animations in tools like webflow and just export the code and it's wonderful and it's ready I wish there was something like this for mobile app developers by the way I kind of have this idea of developing kind of like web flow but for mobile apps because I think this is a major point right now but anyway back to the point when working on mobile apps which is I have a few projects right now working on mobile apps there is nothing like this right now that I can hand over readymade animation so I have to rely on developers to actually execute my ideas so today I had a call with a developer on a project that we're working together I've created kind of actually pretty complex animation using After Effects I threw there bunch of effects which are pretty easy to do in After Effects but are super super complicated to implement in real life it was animation that actually react to your voice sound visualization and histograms and fairly complex animation and I had to explain the developer exactly how they should work how they should react in what pace and how quickly what should happen for him to actually go there and try to develop it himself eles I used to hate doing this and I still don't enjoy doing that right now but I understood that if I really want to achieve great results in my work I have to spend time and actually learn how to be very very clear and nice and understanding to the person who actually has to do the job the developer and actually has to do the the execution on this so if I'm not it sounds silly right but if I'm not even nice and if I'm like why can't you just do it it the way that I imagined it you did it completely wrong this will kind of create frustration that will not allow the project to reach its kind of really designed potential so it's took a lot of kind of Zen meditation to understand this is part of my job I have to talk to a developer right now for two hours on the phone to explain why this animation doesn't look great and how to do this in order for the project to be completed so I told the client that if we really want to go for the best results I will have to actually accompany the developer step by step and do the iteration with him and spend time on meetings and Skype calls to actually do this and in order for me not to not feel like I'm doing something which I'm not being paid for we actually set up a bank of hours for kind of uh working with the developer on the animation so now I feel better at least I'm getting paid for this and I actually feel like the results are getting better and better and just recently when struggling with communicating the animation to the developer I came across this article about an After Effects plugin called L um that is actually something that Airbnb created to export directly animation from um from After Effects directly into kind of creating the code for SVG animation so I think this is a great great way forward and I really want to give this a try again specifically in my case the project that I'm working on it I cannot use this because I need the to react to voice so I cannot use this but I think this looks pretty promising and I'm going to give it a try anyway that's all for today guys it's going to be a short day today because I'm trying to help my wife as I came back from vacation so I'm going to pick up Tommy from the kindergarten and spend the afternoon with him so she can chill for a little bit hope you guys have a great day and I'll catch you tomorrow [Music]