animation

If you've ever coded an animation that's longer than 10 seconds with dozens or even hundreds of choreographed elements, you know how challenging it can be to avoid the dreaded "wall of code". Worse yet, editing an animation that was built by someone else (or even yourself 2 months ago) can be nightmarish.

In these videos, I'll show you the techniques that the pros use keep their code clean, manageable, and easy to revise. Scripted animation provides you the opportunity to create animations that are incredibly dynamic and flexible. My goal is for you to have fun without getting bogged down by the process.

We'll be using GSAP for all the animation. If you haven't used it yet, you'll quickly see why it's so popular - the workflow benefits are substantial.

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Staggered animation, also known as "follow through" or "overlapping action" is one of the twelve Disney principles of animation as defined by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book "The Illusion of Life". At its core, the concept deals with animating objects in delayed succession to produce fluid motion.

The technique doesn't only apply to cute character animations though. The Motion design aspect of a digital interface has significant implications on UX, user perception and "feel". (more…)

One thing that single div pieces rarely do is animate. If you can transform your div or one of its pseudo elements, that's fair (as Lynn Fisher does with her fantastic BB-8). But you cannot directly change the opacity or transform of the individual "elements" you create inside your div, since they are not actual DOM elements.

I am a big believer of trying something a little different and interesting to learn tools you otherwise might never learn. Working with the constraints of a single div might not be great for production work, but it can be a great exercise (and challenge) to stretch your skills in a fun way. In that spirit, we'll use this technique to explore how Custom Properties (CSS Variables) work and even provide us a path to animation inside our div.

There are many ways to make icons for a website. Inline SVG is scalable, easy to modify with CSS, and can even be animated. If you're interested in learning more about the merits of using inline SVG, I recommend reading Inline SVG vs Icon Fonts. With ever increasing browser support, there's never been a better time to start working with SVGs. Snap Animation States is a JavaScript plugin built around Snap.svg to help create and extend icon libraries with scaleable, editable SVG icons. Snap Animation States makes it easy to load and animate those SVGs with a simple schema.

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Our own Sarah Drasner has published a book! You can grab it from the O'Reilly website or Amazon.

If you need a little convincing, I figured I would post the foreword I wrote for the book here, then you can continue reading over on the O'Reilly site.

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I recently launched a CSS animation course for designers and developers wanting to improve their web animation skills. While building the course, I ran into the issue where content would animate before assets had downloaded. This article covers the approach I put together to fix the problem and ensure all animations played when expected.

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I recently published a book and an interactive course called Coding for Visual Learners. It teaches coding to beginners from scratch using the widely popular JavaScript programming language and the p5.js programming library. Since p5.js a great and an easy to use drawing library, I wanted to make use of it to create the cover of my book and course as well. This is a tutorial on how to create this particular visual using JavaScript and p5.js.

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Let's combine three things we just learned here on CSS-Tricks:

One, transitioning to auto dimensions. Two, Ajaxing for stuff in a modern way. Three, waiting for images to be loaded to measure them.

With all these three things in our toolbox, we can Ajax for some arbitrary content and insert it onto the page with a revealing height animation. Tricky tricky!

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You might have heard of RxJS, or ReactiveX, or reactive programming, or even just functional programming before. These are terms that are becoming more and more prominent when talking about the latest-and-greatest front-end technologies. And if you're anything like me, you were completely bewildered when you first tried learning about it.

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