What We're Looking For
You think in keyframes and easing curves. You know the difference between ease-out and cubic-bezier(0.16, 1, 0.3, 1) — and you have an opinion about when to use each. Animation isn't decoration to you; it's communication.
You see the 1px misalignment everyone else missed. You notice when letter-spacing is off by 0.02em. You're the person who screenshots a UI and circles the thing that's bugging you before anyone else even noticed.
- Ship it, don't just spec it.
You can build what you design. Whether it's CSS animations, Framer Motion, Lottie, or GSAP — you're comfortable implementing your own work in code. Bonus if you're using AI tools like Cursor or Replit to move even faster.
You have a strong point of view on what looks and feels good. You're inspired by great product design — Linear, Stripe, Arc — but you don't cargo-cult. You develop your own sensibility and defend it.
You don't spend three weeks on a transition spec. You prototype fast, ship it, see how it feels in production, and iterate. Perfection is the result of fast loops, not slow deliberation.
Requirements
You use AI tools to prototype and build. Cursor, Claude, Replit, Midjourney — whatever gets you from idea to implementation fastest. The days of a designer silo'd off in Figma are numbered, and you know it.
You can read and write CSS, work with React components, and implement animations directly in the codebase. You don't need an engineer to translate your vision — you can put it in the product yourself.
You understand how motion, color, and typography work together to create an emotional response. You can make a landing page feel exciting or a settings page feel calm — and you know why those are different problems.
You don't just design one-off animations. You build reusable motion patterns and interaction primitives that work across the entire product. Consistency at scale.