Design Tools’ Rotate-and-Come-Back Problem
Steve Ruiz has a new “extra-obscure edition” of design tool micro-UX that deserves attention. When you select multiple elements, rotate them, then re-select and try to rotate back, those shapes don’t land where you started — they’ve wandered off.
Why the Drift Happens
The root cause: your selection rotates around a center point (called the transform-origin in CSS). That center is recalculated after rotation, producing a slightly different result when you later undo the move.
Ruiz’s Fix
Once a user starts a rotation, we hold onto the center point; if the user rotates again, we re-use that same point; and we only give it up once the user makes a new selection.
That’s it — simple but effective. Ruiz digs deeper in his full post, with reactions on Twitter.
