RECIPES

Any pressable element. Instant feedback that the interface heard the user.

scale() scales children too — the label and icons come along, which is what makes it read as a physical press.

No hover gating needed here: :active is a real press on touch. Gate any :hover styling separately.

Dropdown, popover, menu, select

Scales out of its trigger, not out of thin air.

The transform-origin is the whole point — the panel should look like it came out of the thing you clicked.

Tooltip

Same shape as a popover, faster, plus the detail most implementations miss.

The initial delay prevents accidental activation. After that, skipping both the delay and the animation makes the whole toolbar feel faster.

Modal

The one popover that stays centered.

Animate the backdrop’s opacity alongside it so they read as one surface.

Drawer / sheet

This is how Vaul hides a drawer before animating it in.

Add drag and it becomes a gesture problem — see Drag to dismiss below.

Toast

• ease rather than ease-out, slightly slower than typical UI: Sonner reads as elegant partly because its motion is tuned to the component’s personality rather than to the generic UI budget.
• If @starting-style isn’t available, fall back to the mount flag:

When toasts stack and the list reflows, the opacity change has to work against the height change. There’s no formula for that pair — adjust until it feels right, then check it again the next day.

Accordion / collapse

Keep it short — this is one of the few animations that costs layout on every frame, so a long duration is expensive as well as sluggish. Measure the content height in JS (or use a headless primitive that supplies it) rather than animating to auto.

Stagger a group entrance

For a list or grid the user sees occasionally — not for a list they scroll past all day.

Stagger is decorative — it must never block interaction while it plays.

Hold to confirm

For destructive actions where a plain click is too easy to fire by accident.

linear is correct here — the fill is a progress indicator, and progress shouldn’t ease.

Tab indicator with a color transition

Timing individual color transitions across a tab list never quite lands. Clip instead.

Duplicate the tab list. Style the copy as the active state — different background, different text color. Clip the copy so only the active tab shows, and animate the clip on change:

The text and background change together, in perfect sync, because they’re one element being revealed rather than two colors being interpolated.

Scroll reveal

Marketing surfaces only. Don’t do this to functional UI a user visits daily.

Trigger with IntersectionObserver, or Motion’s useInView with { once: true, margin: "-100px" }. Fire it once — re-animating on every scroll-by is an interface fighting its reader.

Drag to dismiss

The gesture recipe. Springs, not durations, because the user can reverse mid-motion.

Four details that separate a good drag from a bad one:

• Pointer capture once the drag starts, so it continues when the pointer leaves the element’s bounds.
• Multi-touch protection — if (isDragging) return on new touch points, or switching fingers mid-drag makes the element jump.
• Damping past boundaries — dragging beyond a natural edge moves the element less the further it goes. Real things slow before they stop.
• Friction, not a wall — allow the over-drag with rising resistance rather than refusing it.

Settle with a spring so an interrupted drag keeps its velocity:

Masking a crossfade that won’t settle

When two states overlap visibly during a transition and no amount of easing or duration tuning fixes it, blur the seam:

Without blur the eye reads two distinct objects swapping. Blur blends them into one perceived transformation. Keep it under 20px — heavy blur is expensive, especially in Safari.

Programmatic, without a library

When the motion needs JS control but not a dependency, WAAPI gives you CSS-grade performance:

Hardware-accelerated, interruptible, no bundle cost.