Animations don’t just make things look cool, they provide context and additional details. Animations give us a third dimension with which to communicate: time. The real world doesn’t move in a perfectly linear fashion and when we see things that do, it feels awkward and unnatural. With motion, the difference between dull and delightful often comes down to the math.

This talk walks you through the basic principles of animation design and the simple formulas that can be used to create robust animations. Starting with a quick introduction into interpolation functions and how they can be crafted to represent natural movement we will then see how this translates into software applications and then dive briefly into physics engines.

You can create dramatic effects with just a little code and without needing to rely on heavy frameworks. Performance and optimization tradeoffs between CSS3 and Javascript will also be discussed as well as how and when to use the various tools available.