Recent advances in numerical optimization provide new opportunities to improve the performance of motion systems and to push them to their limits. This requires however a unique combination of expertise in optimization and motion control design and implementation, a combination which is present at our Optimization in Engineering Center OPTEC. This paper presents three of OPTEC's realizations in the field of motion control, where this unique combination of expertise has led to the formulation of control design problems as convex programs that can be solved efficiently to a global optimum, allowing to trade-off conflicting design objectives in a systematic way.