Articles Tagged animation

Before we delve into making a realistic motion blur in CSS, it’s worth doing a quick dive into what motion blur is, so we can have a better idea of what we’re trying to reproduce.

Have you ever taken a photo of something moving quickly, especially under low light, and it turned into a blurry streak? Or maybe the whole camera shook and the whole shot became a series of streaks? This is motion blur, and it’s a byproduct … Read article “How to Create a Realistic Motion Blur with CSS Transitions”

I’ve been lucky to have worked with some of the best designers in the industry, including Zhenya Rynzhuk, Louis Paquet, Maria de la Paz Vargas, and of course, dozens of the amazing designers at MediaMonks. Many of the projects we’ve worked on require custom animation and guidelines that enable developers to be fully creative and push the limits of what we think is possible with CSS and JavaScript.

Then there are other projects that lack resources. … Read article “The Paper Prototype Rule”

It’s true, web animation can be accessible! Sometimes it just takes a little extra effort to make sure that it is. There are strategic things we can do to make sure our animations have a positive impact on accessibility, like planning how they contribute to the overall UX and ease of use of our site. There are also more tactical considerations for making sure the animations on our site are accessible, and that’s where the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)… Read article “Accessible Web Animation: The WCAG on Animation Explained”

CSS still can’t animate to auto dimensions.

.dropdown {
  transition: 0.2s;
  height: 0;
}
.dropdown.open {
  /* the height will change, but it won't animate. */
  height: auto;
}

There is JavaScript trickery you can try. Brandon Smith outlined several techniques here a little while back. My mind always goes to this solution just because it’s so simple:… Read article “Hide Scrollbars During an Animation”

The <canvas> element in HTML and Canvas API in JavaScript combine to form one of the main raster graphics and animation possibilities on the web. A common canvas use-case is programmatically generating images for websites, particularly games. That’s exactly what I’ve done in a website I built for playing Solitaire. The cards, including all their movement, is all done in canvas.

In this article, let’s look specifically at animation in canvas and techniques to make them look smoother. … Read article “Easing Animations in Canvas”

If you’ve ever wanted to add a pause between each iteration of your CSS @keyframes animation, you’ve probably been frustrated to find there’s no built-in way to do it in CSS. Sure, we can delay the start of a set of @keyframes with animation-delay, but there’s no way to add time between the first iteration through the keyframes and each subsequent run. 

This came up when I wanted to adapt this shooting stars animation for use as the background … Read article “A New Way to Delay Keyframes Animations”

If you’re going to build a multi-step CSS animation or transition, you have a particular conundrum. The second step needs a delay that is equal to the duration of the first step. And the third step is equal to the duration of the first two steps, plus any delay in between. It gets more and more complicated until you might just be like, nahhhhh I’ll use more technology to help me.

Paul Hebert:

Lately I’ve been using custom properties

I’ve been coding web animations and helping others do the same for years now. However, I have yet to see a concise list of tips focused on how to efficiently build animations, so here you go!

I will be using the GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP). It provides a simple, readable API and solves cross-browser inconsistencies so that you can focus on animating. The code and concepts should be understandable even if you’ve never used GSAP. If you’d like to familiarize … Read article “Tips for Writing Animation Code Efficiently”

Animations have come a long way, continuously providing developers with better tools. CSS Animations, in particular, have defined the ground floor to solve the majority of uses cases. However, there are some animations that require a little bit more work.… Read article “Performant Expandable Animations: Building Keyframes on the Fly”