Stop Animating.

FI/ThinkSwedish has some pretty cool tips for how animation relates to user interfaces. Essentially, stop animating everything.

It's nice to see my preferred approach to animating UI elements (i.e. minimal and fast) validated.

Oh, sure, there's plenty of places it's appropriate or even ideal to use alot of motion, but when it comes to application or portal design, I think it's more important to make sure the user is never left waiting for an animation to finish.

You don't want to end up like Avenue A/Razorfish. Not only did they pretty blatantly borrow a look from Group94, they did it poorly. Continuing the theme of the post, the site feels slow, despite running at a high, smooth frame rate due to the fact that everything needs to animate in and out. It feels slow, rather than snappy. It's a shame. (But it's still an improvement over their old site).