moguzbulbul/blueprint-animation
Learn a data‑driven way to animate UI diffs as a blueprint without external libraries.
The repo ships a single‑page demo that visualizes a UX redesign by overlaying a blueprint on the old interface and gradually converting it into the new layout. Each change is highlighted as a line or shape that appears, fades, or moves, giving viewers a clear, animated narrative of what was altered.
Under the hood the animation is driven by requestAnimationFrame and the HTML5 Canvas API. A timeline array defines the start frame, duration, and drawing instructions for every step. On each tick the engine clears the canvas, replays the active steps, and applies simple easing functions to smooth the transitions, keeping the frame budget under 16 ms on typical laptops.
The code is deliberately modular: a renderer module abstracts canvas primitives, a scheduler module walks the timeline, and a JSON‑style manifest describes the before‑after diff (element bounds, colors, and label text). This separation lets designers edit the manifest without touching the rendering loop, and developers can plug the renderer into any existing page with a single script tag.
With 74 GitHub stars the project has attracted attention from designers who need a quick, dependency‑free way to showcase redesigns. The trade‑off is that it only supports 2‑D vector outlines and requires manual step definition, so it isn’t a drop‑in diff tool for complex, animated UIs. Nevertheless, its simplicity makes it easy to extend or embed in documentation sites.
TakeawayThe animation runs from a declarative step list rendered each frame via requestAnimationFrame.