CSS Animations, transitions and motion UI

In this session, we'll be covering the current capabilities of native css animations and transitions. Additionally, we'll dig into how this can be made easier using CSS language extentions like SASS and dive deep into the css animation framework MotionUI.

MotionUI in an open source Sass library for creating CSS transitions and animations from ZURB. Originally integrated into Foundation for Apps, the code is now a standalone library. Motion UI includes more than two dozen built-in transition and animation classes that make prototyping easy. When you move to a production environment, the library gives you total control over how your effects work.

The core of the library is a set of powerful transition and animation Sass mixins, which give you complete control over the details of an effect, from what direction an element slides, to how far it spins, to how intensely it shakes. Motion UI also includes a large number of pre-made CSS classes to help you get going quickly.

The library was designed for use with the Foundation frameworks, but can be adapted to work with any framework's animation library, such as Angular or React.

About Michael Carducci

Michael Carducci spent years learning to see things as they actually are; first as a magician, then as a software architect, now as both simultaneously. And somehow that’s not even the whole story.

He’s the author of Mastering Software Architecture (Apress, 2025) and is currently writing The Semantic Layer. He has spent over 25 years following interesting problems; through roles from individual contributor to CTO and back again, across industries and continents.

As a speaker, he applies the same toolkit he uses in close-up magic: attention, misdirection, timing, storytelling, and the instinct to take the long way around when that’s where the truth lives. Audiences at hundreds of conferences across four continents have described his talks as the kind that change how you think about a problem rather than just what you know about it.

He also makes YouTube videos about technology and curiosity with his wife Kate, because some ideas are too important (or too interesting!) to leave only in conference rooms.

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