Principles, Techniques, Properties, and Values

Tyler Waye says it as good as any when he writes, "Principles… are the underlying premises and rules of function giving rise to any number of techniques. These elements remain consistent, no matter what is happening." It bears repeating that Principles are agnostic of design.

From there, we can imagine a hierarchy with Principles at the top, Techniques further down, Properties below that, and Values at the bottom.

Techniques can be thought of as the various and unlimited executions of Principles and/or combination of Principles. I think of technique as akin to 'style.' Properties are the specific object parameters that are being animated to create the technique. These include (and are not limited to) position, opacity, scale, rotation, anchor point, color, stroke-width, shape, etc. Values are the actual numeric property values that vary over time to create what we call 'animation.'

So to land the plane here (and jumping ahead a bit), we could say that a hypothetical UI animation reference is using the Obscuration Principle with a 'blurred glass' Technique that affects the Blur and Opacity Properties at a Value of 25px and 70% respectively.

Now we have some tools to work with. And more importantly, these linguistic tools are agnostic of any specific prototyping tool.