Blur the New Black?
Recently I’ve been enchanted by the simple beauty of this image from TUAW. Obviously the icons are very beautiful to start with, but this use of blur to imply different focal points really catches my attention. I’d love to find more variations on this design approach.
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Another example of attractive blur: Wacoms Bamboo Dock online interface displays a motion-blurred application page image as it slides. I think the result is subtlety beautiful. Motion blur emulates how the human eye, or a camera lens captures an image of moving objects which is slightly blurred. Pixar films would probably be unwatchable without motion blur, as invented by Tom Porter and modern computer games make good use of motion blur too.
Motion blur synthesizes the kind of blurred image a camera or retina receives when watching moving object. Without it, each image, lasting for 1/30th of a second, is absolutely still and sharp. the resulting animation is jerky and unnatural. See examples below. Increasing framerates for games, digital video and GPUs may reduce the problem, but I suspect there is something stylistically/aesthetically attractive about motion blur.
For example: This is a render of an icon spinning at 30 frames per second. Notice how the motion looks jerky and quite unattractive.
Here’s the same animated icon rendered with motion blur. The result is much more natural, aesthetically pleasing. I also find it has some kind of indescribable ‘cool’ to it. What do you think?

Keith Lang is a Co-founder and Interaction Designer at