Butter Blog

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  Recipes for 3D Materials

  Dave Pagurek·August 25, 2026Engineering

  Sometimes when creating motion graphics, you end up dealing with 3D scenes. You then have to make a bunch of decisions about how to stage the scene, balancing a degree of realism with a degree of heightened reality to add punch. Those may not be decisions you're familiar with if you have been using code for more abstract visuals.

  It's a pretty deep topic that bridges other fields, like photography, but there are a few patterns that will get you to a good starting place that I keep using in my own work.

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  Animation Principles for Motion Graphics

  Dave Pagurek·August 11, 2026Engineering

  Every animator is an actor. It's a bit more abstract when doing motion graphics as opposed to cartoons, but it's still true! Your motion brings visuals to life, and the choices you make in your animation control the character of that life.

  If you are using code as your medium, how do you go about doing that? There are a few techniques that give you a solid foundation to work with: easing, staggering, and secondary motion. I'll go over what that those are and what they look like in code.

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  A Creative Tool for Everyone

  Dave Pagurek·July 31, 2026Engineering

  Everyone has the capacity to be creative.

  For six years at Butter, we’ve been building a creative tool around this idea. In that time, a lot has changed, and you’ve probably seen lots of products pop up with similar proclamations, built around letting you prompt images or videos. If those have felt disappointing, frustrating to use, or like they miss the point, we agree: we don’t think that’s the future of creativity. We have an alternate vision of what it means to let everyone be creative: give you the power to make creative choices, and let you do so on your own terms using the unique properties of code as a medium.