Flickery Nonsense for the Overworked Motion Designer

For motion designers with clients demanding flashy movement that is in fact total nonsense, Vancouver-based art director and motion designer Peter Quinn created a handy set of 100 pre-made fake user interface (UI) animations.

“PQ FUI toys is meant for those situations where you just have to drop in some Fake UI bullshit to make something look a pinch more interesting, adding a little sparkle, or just saving yourself 10 minutes,” Quinn told Hyperallergic.

The UI is basically the tools with which a user navigates a digital device, whether it be the icons on your iPhone or the scrolling functions on this very website. The PQ FUI Toys, available on Aescripts for dragging and dropping into After Effects, include such high-action gibberish as “nice, but useless circle,” frenetic “pointless graphs,” and even some Knight Rider talking car red light action.

Quinn explained that after 10 years working in busy agencies, he had his own hoard of ready-made animation that helped keep his productivity high, with characters, sound, and other “flickery UI jazz” that he found more and more in demand.

“Nowadays you see this type of thing everywhere,” he said. “It’s its own sub-genre of motion design; at one end you’ve got wonderful, well-conceived, could-actually-work-in-real-life user interface graphics that are not only mesmerizing design, but also useful storytelling devices.” He cited as an example Jayse Hansen’s graphics for the Iron Man films, where the futuristic controls for the Iron Man superhero suit were actually functional and had meaning, although they were fictional. However on the other end, there are the merely interesting dots and lines, and wildly spinning “bunch of knobs,” that serve no purpose aside from visual flair. Below is a selection of the fake user interface animations Quinn shared with Hyperallergic as GIFs.

The PQ FUI Toys by Peter Quinn are available on Aescripts.