The UI Animation Certification Course contains all the individual courses, plus my Creating Usability with Motion course, which is the online version of the in-person workshop I deliver to design teams at leading tech companies like Airbnb, Slack, Dropbox, Oracle, Salesforce, and more. There is also additional extra content in the certification course, not found elsewhere in the individual mini-courses.

You get lifetime access, and all lessons are available 24/7 for you to view on your phone via the app or your user portal. You can also download all lessons and lesson assets.

The ‘Fast Start’ module is for designers with no experience with motion, using a timeline, or keyframes. Regardless of where your current skill level is at, I can guarantee you that someone before you started off with less experience, and was able to learn how to deliver motion in their projects.

Yes, typically with motion graphics, there is little attention paid to motion standards, rapid iteration, or back and forth between design and animation. If you want to transition to UX from motion design, it is important you learn a slightly different way of working. Just because you can build something in AE does not mean your work will translate to engineers.

Yes. All lessons are designed to give you immediately available tools and best practices to use right away in your projects. Many of the techniques based lessons are under 20 minutes, so you can jump in, watch those, and then apply those techniques to your project. If your project involves timing, you can swipe-and-deploy my recipes to bypass hours of work and create perfectly timed animations.

I research nearly every possible technique and stress-test it in real world UX workflows before teaching it. Sometimes I can spend days researching a single technique to make sure you learn the absolutely best way to build something in a UX workflow.

I’ve had many developers and engineers take my courses. It gives them a real advantage when it comes to giving them tools to take more ownership in their products.

Yes. For the most part, UI Animation uses a very small subset of After Effects, and once you get the basics, you can create most projects fairly quickly. Additionally, most UI Animation involves transitions between elements, not doing fancy character animation, which is more complex and takes longer to learn. If you want to take longer courses that aren’t built around rapid learning and delivering results quickly, School of Motion offers great animation courses.

No, it does not. There are two reasons designers turn to After Effects. The first is that it lets you create anything you want without constraint. No other prototyping tool allows for this degree of freedom, flexibility, and total control over your ideas. The second is that you can now export project assets directly out of After Effects to engineers.

No. After Effects is a paid app from Adobe and they offer a 30 day fully functional demo for free on their site which you can use to complete this course.

Yes, you will learn how to use the Bodymovin plugin (included in the course) to export your assets as a JSON file that you can handoff to your engineers. You will also learn ways of building your transitions and components in ways that you can communicate critical information like easing and duration to your engineers and have them implement one to one on their end.

Over the years, I’ve personally trained the design teams at companies including Dropbox, Slack, Oracle, Salesforce, Airbnb, and more. These are hands-on UI animation workshops. My course content mirrors these high end training sessions I deliver onsite. I’ve also had thousands of top designers at leading companies take my training. Some of these folks work at companies including Google, Microsoft, Uber, Facebook, and more. I’ve also personally worked on UI Animation projects for companies including Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, XBox, Motorola, HBO, and more. From this real world experience, I’ve generated real-world workflows and best practices that I share in my training. Finally, in my social and professional networks, I have friends and mentors who have designed the motion standards for Microsoft, motion standards for Google.

One of the most common misconceptions is that it takes weeks or months to learn After Effects. While it is true that After Effects is a deep animation tool, nearly all UI Animation uses a very specific subset of After Effects features. I’ve had designers go from zero animation experience to delivering polished renders in less than a day. My goal is for you to go with zero motion experience and be delivering professional motion in just a few hours. I’ve seen it happen. The key is that I take you through my rapid-learning framework where you become extremely comfortable with the basics, and are able to quickly get professional results out of the gate. From there, we layer on additional skills like 3D and animating shapes and data to round out your skillset.

It completely depends on your needs. If you are interested in having total control over your animations, and having no limit to your ideas, then After Effects may be your primary tool to deliver those results. I’ve met folks who only work in After Effects. I am one of those people. On the other hand, if you need to deliver fully interactive prototype renders and can tolerate the limitations of those tools, I would recommend looking at a tool like Principle, Framer, or Figma, all of which are used by leading UX designers. 

It depends. If you want to get buyoff on your motion ideas, motion is critical to pitching and selling your ideas. And it must look hot so that stakeholders, team members, and clients want to have it. If your motion looks amateurish, your ideas will never sell. The good news is that it is far easier to create beautiful motion studies than most people think. It gets even better as you’ll save massive amounts of time with the workflows, swipe files and tricks you will learn which will quickly eclipse the time spent on the course. If you are working on simple click through projects, I might hold off learning UI Animation for now.

Yes, in the motion standards module, you will learn how to create ‘engineer friendly animations’ using industry standard easings and durations. Additionally, you will learn how to export JSON files to engineers using the Lottie framework.

Yes, you will be learning how to ideate motion from your designs, using a simple step-by-step framework that I teach to design teams and have stress-tested in real world projects.

Yes, this course is specifically designed to be highly relevant to real world UX/UI projects and workflows, and to give you tools and frameworks to have you deliver professional motion from your design source files. Additionally, because it is so easy to get lost or overwhelmed, the course not only focuses on how to produce high quality work quickly, but also what common mistakes to avoid, so that you don’t go down the wrong path, which can be costly in terms of your time.

Yes, you will learn how to make a real world, results based case for motion in your projects. You will be given tools and lessons to help you ideate and present your motion ideas in ways that resonate with your target audience, whether they are stakeholders, clients, team members, or engineers.

Yes, all lesson videos are downloadable for you to watch at your convenience, and sync with your mobile or tablet devices.

The lessons vary, but most lessons come with the After Effects project source file (AEP), linked design assets, and step by step lesson PDFs and resource checklists.