Most UI animation you see is faked in After Effects — beautiful, but a video, not a working interface. Rive is different: the animations are real, interactive, state-driven, and light enough to run live in a product. So I set out to learn it properly — not with a tutorial file, but by building interactive UI components good enough to ship.

This is a self-initiated craft study: a set of Rive-animated interfaces I designed and built to push what interactive product animation can feel like.

Static mockups don't tell you how an interface feels. A number that counts up, a dial that responds, a control that springs — those micro-moments are the difference between a UI that looks nice and one that feels alive. Rive lets you build those moments as real, lightweight, interactive components rather than heavy video, which is exactly why it's becoming the tool for high-end product motion.

I wanted that capability in my hands — fluently. So I built.

A set of interactive UI components, animated end to end in Rive:

→ An ETH wallet interface — an animated circular amount dial that counts and responds (7.28 ETH), gradient rings that react, balance cards, and Top up / Send controls with motion built in. → An audio/control module — animated knobs, a value scrubber moving along a scale, and a gradient orb that shifts as values change. → A music player — a "Productivity" playlist with play/pause transitions, an animated now-playing state, and equalizer motion.

Each one is designed to look like something you'd actually find in a polished product — then made to move.

The animation you see on the surface is the easy half. The hard half is what's underneath — and this is where most of the work went.

This component isn't a linear animation that plays start to finish. It's driven by a state machine with data binding: the values (amount, balance) are bound to real inputs, so the dial and numbers respond to data rather than to a fixed timeline. Getting that right means designing the states, the transitions between them, and the logic that decides which state plays when — so the animation reacts correctly no matter what value comes in, instead of just looping a pretty sequence.

That's the genuine skill jump in Rive: moving from "animator making a nice loop" to "building an interactive system that behaves like real product UI." Wiring the state machine so the motion stayed smooth and logically correct across every value was the actual challenge in this study — and the reason I built it.

A clean-looking component hides a lot of structure. Behind the surface are stacked, individually-timed layers — cards, shapes, text, controls — each keyframed and sequenced so they resolve into one coherent, effortless-feeling motion. Keeping that many moving parts feeling calm rather than busy is its own discipline.

This study did what I wanted: it took Rive from "a tool I knew about" to "a tool I can build production-grade interactive UI animation in." The output is portfolio motion for now — but the same components could drop straight into a live product, which is the whole point of building in Rive rather than faking it in video.

It's the capability I reach for when a product's UI deserves to feel alive, not just look good.