Is it 2026 already?

Starting the year off slow.

Jan 26, 2026

No New Year’s greetings from me as I’ve well missed that deadline!

What do I want 2026 to bring me?

More talks.

I’ve always wanted to chat away about my motion journey. And I guess this newsletter does exactly that. But now I’m wanting to do it in person. In February, I’ll be giving talks to two colleges about it all. And hoping for more chances to do so throughout the year.

More Rive.

As much as I’ve nattered on about Rive, I haven’t actually done a tonne of client work with it. I put this down to the fact that the industry I mainly work in, the third sector, isn’t looking for that kind of work. Yet. While I do pitch it to them, in the end, they are looking for animation videos and not website work. So this is now on me to go out there and beat the drum louder.

More accessibility.

I want to make animations more accessible. How? Not sure yet. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try. It’s so often an afterthought in the animation process and usually ends up being subtitles embedded in a video. That’s not good enough.

As with all new year predictions, who knows how these will pan out? Hopefully better than giving up pastries…

What I’ve been working on

I started off the year by working on a very cool project. The animation for the Tour de France/Tour GB route announcement!

With branding from Tour de France, I created location markers for each city and town. As I knew there would be a lot of them, I built the text to be easily editable. This meant using an expression for the write on effects. Through this expression, I could add icons that would randomly appear and disappear. All I had to change then was the location name and voilà!

In a nod to cycling and France, the array (computer term for a list) could be made up of glyphs like [”↘”,”→”,”↗”,”à”,”é”, “É”]. Notice how all the arrows move forward, never back, like the cyclists during the race. I added a few “accent” vowels too. I’ll link the code below. *This is not my code, I saw it online a few years back. If anyone knows who originally posted it, let me know so I can credit them.

It was a pleasure working with everyone at Double Take Projections on this job. Glad I could play a small role in it all.

CREATE TEXT LAYER

ADD TWO SLIDERS
Name them "Posterize Time" and "Character Offset Percentage"

ALT CLICK in Source Text on Text Layer and paste the following:

posterizeTime(effect("Posterize Time")("Slider").value);
var probability = effect("Character Offset Percentage")("Slider").value / 100;
var characters = ["↘","→","↗","à","é", “É”];

var textLines = value.split("\r");
var numTextLines = textLines.length;
for (var l = 0; l < numTextLines; l++) {
    var oldLine = textLines[l];
    var newLine = getNewLine(oldLine);
    textLines[l] = newLine;
}

function getNewLine (oldLine) {
    var newLine = "";
    for (var i = 0; i < oldLine.length; i++) {
        if (random() <= probability) {
            newLine += getRandomCharacter(characters);
        } else {
            newLine += oldLine.charAt(i);
        }
    }
    return newLine;
}

function getRandomCharacter (a) {
    return a[Math.floor(random() * a.length)];
}

textLines.join("\r");	

Adjust the Sliders and keyframe as needed.

A nice job came in last week; making some Rive animations for a website. This one didn’t have much interaction as that’s not what the client needed. But I had fun with the designs and figuring out how to animate them in a fun way, without being a massive distraction on the site. I’ll show them once the site is live.

[Video Description. A stainlesss steel watch with a black dial and white hands. It is showing the current time of 11:26. A mouse moves around the screen, with a rectangle that shows a zoomed in cropped image of the watch.]

I also spent an afternoon in Rive testing a concept. I wanted to see how quickly I could alter an image of a watch and rig it up to show the live time. Turns out, quick enough. Most of the time was spent masking out the hands on the watch. With Data Binding in Rive, I could do all the calculations in Rive to drive the hand rotation with some simple Javascript. The idea would be that this could live on a watch site and be a nice live feature. I’ll dive back into this again to see how far I can push it.