Bad design != Design. UI design is a communication medium, like technical writing. Within a weekend of fiddling, damn near anyone can operate the tools to assemble interfaces, but that does not mean they are interface designers. Failing to use color to appropriately communicate actions or state and thoughtlessly applied labeling are the actions of graphic designers trying to make things look pretty, or developers do to make things look 'designed.' That happens all the time and is no more an indictment of UI design than wordpress sites running janky homespun themes made from copy-and-pasted tutorial code are an indictment of web development.
> Failing to use color to appropriate communicate actions or state ....
No no no and no again!
Do not use color to to communicate actions or state unless that color can be used to statically differentiate between another color that is present in the UI at the same point in time. This is why syntax highlighting in code editors works because there is a state boundary between a word in one color and a word in another. It is why colors for toggle sliders indicating off and on do not work. What color is 'off' or 'go' or 'enable' or 'disable' or 'allow'. An animation of any type does not help and only adds CPU overhead and UI slowdown.
Animations can be useful only if they assist in disambiguating a transition between states. For example transfer of an item to a different position in a list. If the item animates across the screen the eye is guided to the new position. A toggle slider does not have this issue and should transfer to the new state immediately and the most important design question is how to interpret the current state of the toggle not the animation between the two state.
