Enter and Exit Animation Pattern

Animate overlays, menus, and panels in and out without flicker or orphaned elements.

involved Design Systems

What it adds

A shared lifecycle for anything that appears and disappears, keeping the element present until its exit finishes and returning focus at the correct moment.

What your agent is told to do

1
Identify everything in the app that appears and disappears — dialogs, drawers, menus, popovers, toasts, tooltips, expanding rows — and give them all one lifecycle rather than each rolling its own.
2
Hold the element in the document through its exit and remove it only once the exit has actually completed or been interrupted. Removing it at the moment state changes means the exit never plays.
3
Move focus into the surface once its entrance is far enough along to be visible, and return it to the element that opened the surface only after the exit is done, so the page does not scroll to a target that is still fading.
4
Make every sequence interruptible. Reopening something mid-exit should reverse from its current position, and closing during an entrance should not leave the element stranded halfway.
5
Do not tie removal to a fixed timer that happens to match the duration. Timers drift from the real animation, and any change to the motion tokens silently breaks the element's removal.

Edge cases it handles

An element removed the instant its state flips will never show its exit; it must stay mounted, and inert to interaction, until the exit resolves.
Focus handling is the part that most often goes wrong — moving it in too early strands the user on an invisible surface, and returning it too late lets a keystroke land on the page behind.
Interrupted sequences must reverse from where they are. An element caught between entering and leaving must not jump to either extreme or end up stuck with no state at all.
Under reduced motion the surface appears and disappears immediately, and the mount and unmount timing must still be correct — the lifecycle does not disappear just because the animation does.
An element still mid-exit must not be reachable by tab, must not be announced to screen readers, and must not block clicks on what is behind it.
If the surface is removed for a reason unrelated to the user — a route change, a session expiry, a record being deleted — it must be torn down cleanly rather than left animating against a page that no longer exists.
Nested surfaces, such as a popover inside a dialog, need a defined order so the inner one finishes leaving before the outer one starts.

Definition of done

Every appearing and disappearing surface in the app uses the same lifecycle.
Exit animations play fully; no element is removed before its exit completes.
Focus enters after the entrance is visible and returns only after the exit finishes.
Interrupting an entrance or exit reverses from the current position with no jump or stranded element.
Reduced motion removes the animation while leaving mount and unmount timing correct.
An exiting element is not focusable, not announced, and does not intercept clicks.
Route changes and forced closures tear surfaces down without leaving orphaned nodes.
The feature matches the existing design system.
No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

Z-Index Registry

Spacing Scale

Shadow Scale

How it works

1

Copy the link

Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.
2

Give it to your AI

Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.
3

It inspects, then implements

Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.