Knowing what not to animate

For the longest time I thought design engineering was mostly about motion — crafting beautiful animations, making interfaces feel alive, and polishing interactions until everything moved smoothly. A lot of the work I saw online reinforced that idea. Design engineers were often the people building delightful micro-interactions, clever transitions, and satisfying UI effects.

Over time, that understanding started to feel incomplete.

Animation by itself doesn’t make a product better. In fact, too much motion can easily make an interface slower, noisier, and harder to understand. What began to matter more wasn’t how well something could be animated, but whether it should be animated at all(I had to learn this the hard way when I took down a post that was going viral because it had motion where it wasn't needed).

The deeper part of design engineering is judgment.

Motion in interfaces is a form of communication. When something expands, slides, fades, or transforms, it helps explain what just happened and where the user’s attention should go next. A well-placed animation can clarify relationships between elements, show cause and effect, or make a system feel responsive. But when everything moves, the signal disappears into noise.

Good design engineers don’t animate everything they can. They think carefully about what deserves motion and what benefits from staying still. Sometimes the best interaction is the one that gets out of the way entirely.

In that sense, design engineering isn’t really about animation.

It’s about understanding the interface deeply enough to know where motion adds clarity — and where restraint makes the product better.

Knowing how to animate is a skill.
Knowing what not to animate is the craft.

If you made it this far, I'd love to hear your thoughts. Let me know if it's something that resonates with you on X(Twitter)