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Process
28 Sept 2026
4 min read
The bouncing ball still teaches me things
Every animator draws it first. I drew it again last week and learned something new.
On the back: Every animator draws it first. I drew it again last week and learned something new. From the notebook · 26.
drew this one before lunch. it shows.
It’s the first exercise in every animation course. A ball drops, hits the floor and bounces until it stops. Twelve drawings if you’re lazy, twenty-four if you’re keen. Most people draw it once, get a tick from the tutor and never think about it again.
I’ve drawn it hundreds of times. I draw it to warm up, I draw it when a job is going badly, and I draw it when someone asks me what motion design actually is. It’s the whole job in one ball: weight, timing, spacing and a little bit of lying. Here’s what it keeps teaching me.
Squash is a promise
When the ball hits the floor, it squashes. How much it squashes tells you what it’s made of. A bowling ball barely changes shape. A tennis ball flattens a little and springs back. A water balloon nearly gives up.
The rule that matters is that the ball keeps its volume. If it gets wider, it has to get shorter. Break that rule and the ball stops looking squashy and starts looking like it’s inflating and deflating, which is a different, sadder animation.
Brands work the same way. When I animate a logo, the first question isn’t “what should it do?” but “what is it made of?” A bank’s logo might squash two per cent. A cereal mascot can squash forty. Get it wrong and people feel it before they can say why.
Spacing is the personality
Here’s the part that took me years. The drawings in a bouncing ball are almost identical in every version. Same circle, same floor. What changes is the gap between them.
Drawings close together mean the ball is moving slowly. Far apart, it’s fast. At the top of each bounce the drawings bunch up, because the ball slows, hangs for a moment and falls. Near the floor they spread out, because it’s going as fast as it ever will.
Change the spacing and you change the character. Even spacing makes a robot. Wide at the bottom and tight at the top makes something heavy and honest. Tight everywhere makes something nervous. I spend more time on spacing than on drawing, and I think that’s right.
if a client says it “feels off”, nine times out of ten it’s the spacing. the tenth time it’s the font.
Nothing moves in a straight line
Throw a ball and it travels in an arc. So does a hand reaching for a cup, a head turning, a cursor easing into place on a well-made website. Straight lines read as mechanical, and mechanical reads as cheap.
The bouncing ball makes you draw the arc first, as a faint pencil line, and then hang the drawings on it. I still do this for everything. Before I animate a single frame I draw the path. If the path is ugly, no amount of polish will save the movement.
Path first, drawings second. Every time.
The floor is doing half the work
Students spend all their time on the ball. The floor matters just as much. A hard floor gives a sharp bounce. Sand swallows it. A trampoline throws it higher than it fell, which is funny exactly once.
In brand work the floor is the context: the edge of a phone screen, the side of a box, the bottom of a poster. Whatever your logo lands on should feel like it has a surface. That’s why I don’t trust animations that float in from nowhere and stop in mid-air. Give them something to land on.
My warm-up, if you want to steal it:
Draw the floor before the ball.
Draw the arc as one faint line, top to bottom.
Place the drawings by spacing, not by eye.
Flip through them before you clean anything up.
Timing is a different question
Spacing is where the drawings sit. Timing is how many there are. People mix the two up, and it’s worth keeping them apart.
A ball that takes twelve drawings to fall feels slow and floaty. The same fall in six drawings snaps. You can keep the spacing exactly the same, bunched at the top and stretched at the bottom, and still change the whole mood just by adding or taking away frames.
When something feels wrong, I check timing first, because it’s quicker to fix. Then I check spacing, because it’s usually the real problem.
What I learned last week
I drew the ball again on Tuesday to warm up before a mascot job. Twenty-four drawings, no rush. When I flipped through them, the ball felt heavier than I meant it to. The squash was right. The arcs were right. The spacing at the bottom had crept wider, a few millimetres per drawing.
I hadn’t decided to make it heavy. I was tired, it was nearly lunch, and my hand was falling faster than my head. The drawing knew before I did.
That’s the lesson, and it’s new to me after all these years: the ball doesn’t only show the weight of the ball. It shows the weight of the person drawing it. So now I draw it first thing, before the real work, and I read the spacing the way some people read the weather.
If it’s heavy, I eat something. If it’s nervous, I go for a walk. If it’s just a ball bouncing, I start.
thanks for reading.
Ida is an illustrator and motion designer in Lisbon. She writes about drawing, timing and the business of both.
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