That is a really limiting way to think about it. If you have any experience in UX you understand that there is not a correct way of interaction. People use things in varying ways and the problems they run into are indicators of their experience. User's behaviour cannot be wrong or right. It's just behaviour. You are essentially blaming me for having a bad UX, when I am just using the tools that I am provided.

You are not a closed/static system. You can learn new things. You can make choices. You asked the question. If your behaviour "cannot be right or wrong" and you are "just using the tools you have been provided with" then why even bother asking the question in the first place? Give me a break. Everything you've written here conveniently helps you avoid the issue. You're bending over backwards to ignore the problem at hand.

Dan Winer has been more than accommodating, his advice and encouragement should be more than enough to help you see reason.

As stated in your original post:

But in this case, all of it is going into react. And react does not work well with how I usually develop animations.

Your problem is one of compatibility with React and/or React developers. The only reason I brought up the hiring stuff was to illustrate that this is not an unreasonable proposition, and that in fact, many people manage to work with React and CSS-in-JS animations successfully. If you want to die on that hill, be my guest.

The web platform caters to all people, regardless of how much industry is behind their efforts. That is what makes the web great, it doesn't discriminate Websites who do not use React or Vue, or Ember, or Angular or whatever other Framework are still valid projects.

Yeah, okay. Go work on a project that doesn't use React then? You're asking about a React-specific problem, and then going on some tangent about how React doesn't account for every website on the internet. Excellent point, well made!

People do this for very different reasons. Consider the fact that many people are developing and designing while not even working in this industry. Should we not cater to these people as well? Design Tooling currently is exclusively catering to designers working in big companies.

I just made a website for a small family run restaurant with VueJS/Nuxt and Contentful as their CMS. It works perfectly, loads fast, and they can update it as-and-when they need to. I don't even work at a big company, we're less than 20 people in total. There are only two other designers on my team. A few weeks ago, I taught a friend of mine with zero coding experience to build a simple static site (for an upcoming exhibition) with NuxtJS. We worked together for maybe 2/3 hours? She made her first GitHub commits and everything, learned a bunch of new stuff, hosted the site for free on Netlify, was a genuinely pleasurable experience all round.

Stop hiding behind these pitiable excuses. You don't have to work at a big company to try out new technologies. Front-end development tooling is better and more accessible than it has ever been. Just work with your React developers, learn a new thing, try it their way. If you don't like it, stop taking React projects. I'm sorry, but you're making this so many times more difficult than it has to be. Please forgive my frustration, I just wish you'd be more willing to engage with others (who, believe it or not, have lots of relevant experience in lots of different contexts) and "forgo" your principles in the hope of learning something new.

All things considered, I think I'll respectfully disengage at this point, because I'm not sure you're willing to have a discussion in good faith. I wish you the best of luck though, hope everything works out.

You say this, but he's absolutely correct.

I am using sketch. I don't wanna hear your "you should switch to figma". There is no reason to switch. Until there is one, I'll stay with sketch

This post is reason enough for switching, surely? Doesn't want to hear about switching tools for "no reason" and yet uncritically wastes months going through pointless abstractions when learning some basic coding principles (~12 hours) and doing some basic research (~12 hours) would solve the problem entirely. Everything that's wrong with the design community in a nutshell.

At this point, React and Vue have been around for years. Almost every meaningful job in our industry involves them (or the principles they espouse) in some way, shape or form. One of the designers I hired last year didn't know anything about React, so he decided to build the docs for one of our APIs with React to learn the ropes. Our company uses Vue, so there was no pressure for him to do this, and yet he felt it necessary to learn something new and (increasingly) relevant to our industry. This will continue to be helpful as he moves forward in his career.

What's stopping this guy from doing the same? He's repeatedly bashing his head against the wall to try and solve a React problem! Stop whacking the wall and just learn React you crazy fool.

Why should people be expected to indulge someone who is clearly approaching the problem the wrong way? I have worked with dozens of designers who have solved this problem. Most of them got as far as Framer, and then realised they should just learn to code. It's like a car mechanic being upset about electric engines and expecting the world to create an interface where they can lazily apply all of their old tools and concepts without learning anything new. At a certain point, you just have to catch up with the times, or get a new job.

You can be upset about working conditions all you like, you can be upset about impostor syndrome, you can be upset about how much designers and front-end developers are expected to learn to be "hireable", you can be upset about having to do spec work. Will this change hiring practices? No. Will this make the entire JavaScript ecosystem flip on its head to make your life easier? No. Is this an ideal situation? No. But you can choose to do something else if those terms don't agree with your sensibilities.

To answer OP's question. I use HTML/CSS/JS and libraries like anime.js in whichever format our preferred framework uses to communicate animation in my interfaces. By prototyping with these tools, I am already much closer to the final product than any "abstracted solution" could hope to be. Simple question, simple answer.

The Burnout Society is an excellent read, I'd recommend Han's writing to anyone/everyone. Apologies for the naked quote, but gives a good overview:

Much of Han's writing is characterised by an underlying concern with the situation encountered by human subjects in the fast-paced, technologically-driven state of late capitalism. The situation is explored in its various facets through his books: sexuality, mental health (particularly burnout, depression, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), violence, freedom, technology, and popular culture.

In The Burnout Society (original German title: Müdigkeitsgesellschaft), Han characterizes today's society as a pathological landscape of neuronal disorders such as depression, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and burnout. He claims that they are not “infections” but “infarcts”, which are not caused by the negativity of people's immunology, but by an excess of positivity. According to Han, driven by the demand to persevere and not to fail, as well as by the ambition of efficiency, we become committers and sacrificers at the same time and enter a swirl of demarcation, self-exploitation, and collapse.

“When production is immaterial, everyone already owns the means of production him- or herself. The neoliberal system is no longer a class system in the proper sense. It does not consist of classes that display mutual antagonism. This is what accounts for the system's stability.”

Han argues that subjects become self-exploiters:

“Today, everyone is an auto-exploiting labourer in his or her own enterprise. People are now master and slave in one. Even class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself.”

The individual has become what Han calls “the achievement-subject”; the individual does not believe they are subjugated subjects but instead projects.

“We are always refashioning and reinventing ourselves” which “amounts to a form of compulsion and constraint - indeed, to a more efficient kind of subjectivation and subjugation. As a project deeming itself free of external and alien limitations, the I is now subjugating itself to internal limitations and self-constraints, which are taking the form of compulsive achievement and optimization."

Link below is a LibGen mirror.

The Burnout Society [PDF]

Started using Contentful for our marketing website, and thinking about using it for our application moving forward. Too early to say anything for sure, but I find the API really simple to use. I'm sure they have a feature to help with translations too. In my experience, using a native, first-language speaker to directly translate the passage(s) works out best. They tend to know the little idiosyncrasies/ins-and-outs of their language better than any service or algorithm could hope to.

Transifex looks interesting too, but can't say that I've worked on a project that needs a translation solution at that scale.

Best of luck!

Quick 2¢:

I mean, I don't hate it. I don't really like it either though. Feels a lot more generic. Not sure it achieves the "more instantly recognizable" thing they're looking for.

The post suggests that without consistency, a brand is unrecognisable, but I don't think I ever had any trouble identifying that something was "made by Slack". They use old landing page illustrations to show how things have become "inconsistent", but I haven't seen those landing pages in ~18 months, so why would they influence the way I see the brand now? It feels like they're trying to justify the changes to a design lecturer by creating this false narrative that "nobody understands when something is made by Slack, because the colours are different sometimes". Right, okay.

I mean, if Slack is all about "hearing different voices", then surely different interpretations of the hash mark is your brand? Different points of view that see the brand in different ways, but with one common thing that binds them all together, the hash mark. Surely that's the whole point? To celebrate difference within the same. Why would a top-down, enforced design system represent the diversity of the people that use Slack better than, you know, the many different interpretations of the brand created by the many different perspectives that actually make up their user base? Surely you can fashion these different perspectives into something more conceptually strong than another top-down design system that will inevitably fail to enforce compliance. The hash is everywhere, and it's the thing people think about when they think "Slack". Is it really worth sacrificing that deep-seated recognition at the altar of consistency?

If anything, it just seems like a missed opportunity to involve the community in the decision making process (and to reinforce core brand values, that people's voices come first, that discussion is important, and so on). "We really care about hearing what you have to say, so we decided to give the community some options to choose from." It just seems like an obvious home run.

It does work well on different colours, and some of the applications are really nice, but I think it's a stretch to think that people see that logo and go "Oh yes, that's definitely speech bubbles coming from different directions, which is what Slack is all about". The hash felt very.. iconic, and it's everywhere in the application. I just feel like there was an immediate, obvious connection that now feels lost in the shuffle.

+1

Yawn.

This.

So much of this criticism just comes across as terminally insecure. It's quite upsetting to see people so intent on tearing down work that's so obviously great.

Calls out designer for displaying too much "ego" whilst making ridiculous justifications to defend his own ego.

In quite simple terms, what's happened here, Paco, is that you have seen someone else's (truly excellent) work and you've immediately tried to invalidate it based on the fact that she's beautiful, self confident, "not a designer", and so on.

You can hide behind the logical fallacies all you want (It's about design! It's about layout! It's about showing the right face to clients! It's just my opinion!) But in reality, she's leading design at Shopify, and you're doing agency work and UI experiments on Dribbble.

Perhaps instead of thinking up new and novel ways to defend your own ego (the irony), you should take the time to read some of the things Helen has to say, and learn from them.

https://rubyll.co/

Made this for a friend using Tachyons, Siteleaf, Tippy.js, txtwav, Moment.js and Reallysimpleweather. Deployed and hosted for free on Netlify. Learning some basic Javascript stuff/realising how much there is to learn.