animation

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 2D and 3D scenes.

But, you should keep in mind that those libraries were not originally designed to create slideshows or animate DOM elements. There is a library designed just for that, though, and we’re going to cover how to use it here in this post.

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As Sarah mentioned in her previous post about page transition using Vue.js, there is plenty of motivation for designers and developers to be building page transitions. Let's consider mobile applications. While mobile applications are evolving, more and more attention is given to the animation experience, while the web pretty much stays the same. Why is that?

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I used to think implementing swipe gestures had to be very difficult, but I have recently found myself in a situation where I had to do it and discovered the reality is nowhere near as gloomy as I had imagined.

This article is going to take you, step by step, through the implementation with the least amount of code I could come up with. So, let's jump right into it!

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Alright Iron Man fans, fire up your code editors! We are going to make the Arc Reactor from Iron Man’s suit in CSS. We'll walk through every step so you can see exactly makes what happen.

I've been playing with CSS transforms for over five years and one thing that has always bugged me was that I couldn't animate the components of a transform chain individually. This article is going to explain the problem, the old workaround, the new magic Houdini solution and, finally, will offer you a feast of eye candy through better looking examples than those used to illustrate concepts.

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These features have not landed in any stable browsers at the time of writing. However, everything discussed is already in Firefox Nightly by default and key parts are in Chrome Canary (with the Experimental Web Platform Features flag enabled), so I recommend using one of those browsers (when reading this article) to see as many of the features in action as possible.

Regardless your preferred method of animation on the web, there will be times that you need to animate the same property in separate animations. Maybe you have a hover effect that scales an image and a click event that triggers a translate — both affecting the transform. By default, those animations do not know anything about the other, and only one will visually be applied (since they are affecting the same CSS property and the other value will be overridden).

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Transitioning border for a hover state. Simple, right? You might be unpleasantly surprised.

The Challenge

The challenge is simple: building a button with an expanding border on hover.

This article will focus on genuine CSS tricks that would be easy to drop into any project without having to touch the DOM or use JavaScript. The methods covered here will follow these rules

• Single element (no helper divs, but psuedo-elements are allowed)
• CSS only (no JavaScript)
• Works for any size (not restricted to a specific width, height, or aspect ratio)
• Supports transparent backgrounds
• Smooth and performant transition

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User interfaces are most effective when they are intuitive and easily understandable to the user. Animation plays a major role in this - as Nick Babich said, animation brings user interfaces to life. However, adding meaningful transitions and micro-interactions is often an afterthought, or something that is "nice to have" if time permits. All too often, we experience web apps that simply "jump" from view to view without giving the user time to process what just happened in the current context.

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