Motion Versus Obscuring

Thinking about the bigger picture, arguably the most important way to categorize these effects is by whether the text moves or not. Only the slide and scaling effects move the text. All the other effects work by obscuring the text, which remains stationary. This distinction is important visually though it’s challenging to explain why. You could put it simply and say that motion is exciting. So the our palette of effects becomes too heavily weighted towards stationary/obscuring effects, we risk the overall visual impression becoming dull.

One solution is to come up with more motion-based effects, but this is easier said than done. An easier solution is to allow the user to assign weights to the effects, changing their probabilities. I’ve done similar things in my automated undo systems. For each effect, you specify a number that scales the probability of that effect occurring. If it’s 1, it has its usual probability. If it’s 2, it’s twice as likely; if it’s 0.5 it’s half as likely.

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