Investigations

Diagram Animation Editor

TypeScript November 2025

A 3D diagram animation editor for creating animated architecture diagrams with keyframe timelines, presentation mode, and 17+ built-in templates.

This is probably my most ambitious frontend project — a full creative tool for building animated architecture diagrams. Think Cloudcraft meets After Effects, but in the browser.

You get a 2D/3D isometric canvas (React Three Fiber + Drei) where you can lay out nodes and edges representing system architectures. Then there's a timeline editor with keyframe-based animations — you can animate position, opacity, scale, rotation, fill color, and flow progress along edges. There are animation presets too: Fade In, Scale In, Pulse, Shake, Glow, Cascade Reveal.

The real power is the 17+ built-in templates covering common distributed systems patterns — Saga Pattern, CI/CD Pipeline, Kubernetes Cluster, Microservices, Event Sourcing, Circuit Breaker, Data Pipeline, and more. You can load any template, customise it, add animations, and present it in presentation mode with step-by-step or continuous playback.

There's a command palette (Cmd+K) for power users and full keyboard shortcut support. The whole thing is built with Zustand for state management and Tailwind for styling. It's the kind of tool I wished existed when preparing architecture talks.

What this project demonstrates

2D/3D isometric canvas with React Three Fiber + Drei
Keyframe animation system with multiple easing functions
17+ architecture diagram templates (Saga, CI/CD, K8s, Microservices)
Presentation mode with step and continuous playback
Command palette (Cmd+K) and full keyboard shortcuts
Zustand state management, Tailwind styling

Technologies

ReactThree.jsAnimationArchitecturePresentation

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