The Case for Restraint

It is tempting to put orbiting shapes and glitching headlines on every page once you have built them. They are fun, they match the brand, and they took real engineering effort to get right. None of that effort justifies spraying them everywhere.

Not every page needs the full effects budget. A survey of when to dial it back.

A login screen is a focused, brand-forward moment. There is little text to read, so spending your visual budget there costs very little. A pricing page is the exact opposite. Its entire job is legibility and trust; a headline that tears itself apart mid-sentence works directly against that goal, no matter how clever the shader looked in isolation.

The test we return to on every screen: will a visitor trying to pay a bill, compare two plans, or find a form be delayed by this animation? If the answer is yes, take it off the page.