So here are five bits of advice we can use to pull back from the edge of animation abuse. With these thoughts in mind, we can make 2015 the year web animation came into its own.

By Charles Duhigg
Four years ago, when I began working on a book about the secrets of productivity, I had a hidden motivation: I wanted to figure out how to eat dinner with my kids.

Drum machine

1. Do not start with the thank you.

2. Start with any other sentence. If you first say, “Thank you for the nice sweater,” you can’t imagine what to write next. Say, “It was so wonderful to come home from school to find this nice sweater. Thank you for thinking of me on Arbor Day.”

3. Then you’re done.

I recommend learning how to write a very good thank-you note. A child who can write a nice thank-you note can turn into a cocaine dealer five years later and be remembered as the child who wrote nice thank-you notes.

Learn some interesting animation techniques involving Sass and SVG filters for realistic motion effects on the example of animated animals.

I came in from my 10-foot commute once and my 3-year-old looked up from his snack and said, “What did you make today, papa?”

It took me by surprise, as I had always assumed that when I was out of sight I was out of mind. (I now know that children seem to be most interested in you when you’re not around. When you’re actually around, they love to ignore you.) “No, he asks about you all the time,” my wife said. “He always wants to know what you’re doing. I tell him, ‘Papa’s out in his studio making things.’”

Roland TR-808 drum machine emulator

Most people share at least the following traits: they want to be healthy; they like animals; and they value clean air and water. Yet relatively few Americans connect those concerns with their food. As more people start making the link (especially if they’ve seen graphic video footage of industrial animal operations), many decide it’s time to stop eating foods from factory farms. This is a guide for doing just that.

I’ve been a vegetarian for more than twenty years. Unlike the fits and starts described in Jonathan Safran Foer’s autobiographical book Eating Animals, the day I decided to quit eating meat was the last time I ever did.

Before I was a writer, I was simply a reader. Like many readers, I was somewhat in awe of the process. I had no idea how the books I read were made, or how if I was beginning to then aspire to one day write one myself, how on earth I would manage to string so many words together.