Taste

• Taste is the magic that makes an animation feel right, but its hard to master.

• Taste in this context is a preference based on aesthetic considerations. This is highly subjective and personal.

• Ken Kocienda, author of the book Creative Selection, describes taste as the ability to form opinions with your gut that you can also justify with your head.

• To improve taste, surround yourself with great work.

• Try recreating great animations.

  • Record and scrub through animation. This reveals small details you'd have missed otherwise.
  • Look at good design systems like Vercel's Geist.
  • Awwwards has a lot of animations made to impress. Although they're less useful as it is on a dashboard, they can be used to refine motion and taste.

Feeling

• Animations can change how a website feels to a user.
  • Stripe uses slow animations that are still very smooth. This in turn gives the feeling of being premium and reliable.
  • Vercel animations are extremely fast and instant, which conveys their focus on speed.
• Usually animations should feel fast and responsive. But on marketing pages where they're non-interactive and just informative, it makes sense to adjust this intentionally.