Summary

• To engage an audience, it's important for motion to have meaning. Meaning is derived when an animation includes visual cues that are part of our common vocabulary.

• Motion should support the underlying concept and content of your project. If motion is simply added as decoration without having some connection to the ideas in the content, it distracts, rather than enhances, your design.

• Motion can communicate mood, emotion, and personality as effectively as text or color. Although the meaning of certain styles of motion can have a different personal or cultural impact, the way that core emotions are linked to styles of motion is remarkably similar for most people.

• Careful observation and documentation of motion in daily life will help you to build a reference library to draw from when creating animation. Exaggeration and interpretation are crucial for developing a personal style. However, your animation will not be convincing unless you can build on a core understanding of motion in the real world.

• There are many useful tricks or conventions that you can learn to give your animation a more professional look. Overlapping action and secondary motion add life and personality to basic animated movements. Anticipation and follow-through also help to make an animation more convincing and entertaining to watch. Without these finishing touches, animation appears flat and lifeless, no matter how many tweens you use.

• Physics equations can be invaluable for designing advanced motion patterns. Even if you don't have a propensity for numbers, spending some time exploring how basic equations explain force makes it easier to analyze and re-create organic motion. A little math and science combined with your graphics can help to create magic.