Articles Tagged animation

There are an awful lot of libraries that want to help you animate things on the web. These aren't really libraries that help you with the syntax or the technology of animations, but rather are grab-and-use as-is libraries. Want to apply a class like "animate-flip-up" and watch an element, uhhh, flip up? These are the kind of libraries to look at.

I wholeheartedly think you should both 1) learn how to animate things in CSS by learning the syntax yourself … Read article

clip-path is one of those CSS properties we generally know is there but might not reach for often for whatever reason. It’s a little intimidating in the sense that it feels like math class because it requires working with geometric shapes, each with different values that draw certain shapes in certain ways.

We’re going to dive right into clip-path in this article, specifically looking at how we can use it to create pretty complex animations. I hope you’ll see just … Read article

Did you see that neat technique for using the <picture></picture> element with <source media=""/> to serve an animated image (or not) based on a prefers-reduced-motion media query?

After we shared that in our newsletter, we got an interesting reply from Michael Gale:

What about folks who love their animated GIFs, but just didn’t want the UI to be zooming all over the place? Are they now forced to make a choice between content and UI?

I thought … Read article

Creating CSS-based animations and transitions can be a challenge. They can be complex and time-consuming. Need to move forward with a project with little time to tweak the perfect transition? Consider a third-party CSS animation library with ready-to-go animations waiting to be used. Yet, you might be thinking: What are they? What do they offer? How do I use them?

Well, let’s find out.… Read article

Two years ago, I wrote about prefers-reduced-motion, a media query introduced into Safari 10.1 to help people with vestibular and seizure disorders use the web. The article provided some background about the media query, why it was needed, and how to work with it to avoid creating disability-triggering visual effects.

The article was informed by other people’s excellent work, namely Orde Saunders’ post about user queries, and Val Head’s article on web animation motion sensitivity. … Read article

Let’s take a look at a carousel I worked on where items slide in and out of view with CSS animations. To get each item to slide in and out of view nicely I used a cubic-bezier for the animation-timing-function property, instead of using a standard easing keyword.… Read article

I've seen two guides posted to Medium about animation in the last month that have seriously blown up!

• Taras Skytskyi's The ultimate guide to proper use of animation in UX
• Jonas Naimark's Motion design doesn’t have to be hard

There is a lot to learn in each one! The demonstration animations they use are wonderfully well done and each guide demonstrates an interesting and effective animation technique, often paired next to a less successful technique to drive the point home. … Read article

The process of a web browser turning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a finished visual representation is quite complex and involves a good bit of magic. Here’s a simplified set of steps the browser goes through:

1. Browser creates the DOM and CSSOM.
2. Browser creates the render tree, where the DOM and styles from the CSSOM are taken into account (display: none elements are avoided).
3. Browser computes the geometry of the layout and its elements based on the render tree.

While browsing the latest award-winning websites, you may notice a lot of fancy image distortion animations or neat 3D effects. Most of them are created with WebGL, an API allowing GPU-accelerated image processing effects and animations. They also tend to use libraries built on top of WebGL such as three.js or pixi.js. Both are very powerful tools to create respectively 3D and 2D scenes.

But, you should keep in mind that those libraries were not originally designed … Read article