Frequency and novelty
“As a designer, I love to animate everything,” Rauno Freiberg writes in Invisible Details of Interaction Design. Object permanence, a focal point, and delight are good reasons; what is not obvious is when not to. His first clue is the input: pressing a key feels less visceral, more mechanical, than touching glass, so mouse and keyboard interactions can often go unanimated.
Never animate keyboard actions#
Emil Kowalski reaches the same rule in You Don’t Need Animations: he uses Raycast hundreds of times a day, it has no animation, and that is optimal, because he has a clear goal and does not need delighting. Hover effects used many times a day likely benefit most from no animation, and for keyboard-initiated actions, “You should never animate them.”
In 7 Practical Animation Tips the range is “tens, maybe even hundreds of times a day.” His skill turns the rule into tiers.
| Frequency | Animation || ----------------------------------------------------------- | ---------------------------- || 100+ times/day (keyboard shortcuts, command palette toggle) | No animation. Ever. || Tens of times/day (hover effects, list navigation) | Remove or drastically reduce || Occasional (modals, drawers, toasts) | Standard animation || Rare/first-time (onboarding, feedback forms, celebrations) | Can add delight |Ninety percent familiar, ten novel#
In February 2026 Rauno picked the thread up in Novelty. He connects the hypothesis to semantic satiation, where a repeated word temporarily loses meaning, and argues the same happens to extravagant animation in common use.
Novelty “is the equivalent of an exclamation mark. Akin to seasoning, you don’t want too much of it.” From cinematography he borrows the three colour rule (about 60% of the frame primary, 30% secondary, 10% accent) and proposes 90% familiar, 10% novel for software, offered with a grain of salt.
Where should the 10% go? Onboarding, because you onboard once. His product Devouring Details plays a login-to-welcome transition only right after logging in; reload and the page appears instantly. A cookie set on login makes a Next.js rewrite serve an animated index page, then the cookie is cleared.
if ( request.nextUrl.pathname === "/introduction" && request.cookies.get(COOKIE_ANIMATE_INTRO)?.value === "true") { const response = NextResponse.rewrite( new URL("/introduction-animate", request.nextUrl) ); response.cookies.set(COOKIE_ANIMATE_INTRO, "false"); return response;}Paco Coursey’s site staggers on first load but not on return. The iOS Home Screen staggers its icons after you unlock, not when you return already unlocked; in Designing Depth Rauno calls that staggering and says it makes a primitive swipe feel three-dimensional.
Novelty as contrast#
Novelty is the contrast to sameness and works best as contrast. A dramatic route transition he would not want on every page suits a microsite of interviews because the sibling pages are static. Stripe Press is more experimental than the rest of Stripe: “the novelty hits hard because most of the pages aren’t such experiences.” Intent matters too; someone playing a game is there to be entertained and is receptive.
The cautionary case is Arc. The Browser Company built it into a saxophone and found it hard to turn into a piano anyone could play. Their name for the reason is the novelty tax: tabs over here, Spaces, Pin Tabs unlike Bookmarks, too much new to learn.
How much novelty you can get away with depends on your audience. Not Boring found a smaller, passionate one that values beauty and game-feel, and builds novel versions of photos, habits, timers, and calculators for it.
His takeaway: “Make most things familiar, do something unexpected.” Strip motion from actions performed hundreds of times a day, especially keyboard ones, and spend the novelty on moments that happen once. The taste-level version is in Novelty and contrast.