If you’ve ever seen Bret Victor’s Inventing on Principle talk (or any of his talks, really) then you will know about the challenges of designing with code. In general, the abstraction of code can be a huge barrier to people who may otherwise be inclined towards interface design as a vocation. In my last post, I spoke about Personal User Interfaces as a way of bridging that abstraction gap. I even designed a quick-and-dirty interface for creating “kinetic constellations” with the GreenSock JavaScript Library. Well, this is an update to say that I have been working towards more reusable UI’s in the form of composable web components. Not only did I use this more refined UI for a library book locator project, but I was also able to use it to create a more stable UI for creating “kinetic constellations” and taught others to use it to create their own animations at EdUI 2016. Here’s an animation I made at that workshop:

See the Pen Thriller Night SVG Constellation Animation by Shaun Ellis (@sdellis) on CodePen.

Can you guess who it is?