Articles Tagged animation

It’s pretty common to see a loading state on sites these days, particularly as progressive web apps and reactive sites are on the rise. It’s one way to improve “perceived” performance — that is, making it feel as though the site is loading faster than it actually is.

There’s no shortage of ways to make a loader — all it takes is a quick search on CodePen to see oodles of examples, from animated GIFs to complex animations. While it’s … Read article “Let’s Make a Fancy, but Uncomplicated Page Loader”

It would surprise me if you’d never come across a ghost button 👻. You know the ones: they have a transparent background that fills with a solid color on hover. Smashing Magazine has a whole article going into the idea. In this article, we’re going to build a ghost button, but that will be the easy part. The fun and tricky part will be animating the fill of that ghost button such that the background fills up in the direction … Read article “Ghost Buttons with Directional Awareness in CSS”

I’ve recently noticed an interesting change on CodePen: on hovering the pens on the homepage, there’s a rectangle with rounded corners expanding in the back.… Read article “Various Methods for Expanding a Box While Preserving the Border Radius”

Let’s say you were gonna bounce an element all around a screen, sorta like an old school screensaver or Pong or something.

You’d probably be tracking the X location of the element, increasing or decreasing it in a time loop and — when the element reached the maximum or minimum value — it would reverse direction. Then do that same thing with the Y location and you’ve got the effect we’re after. Simple enough with some JavaScript and math. … Read article “Bounce Element Around Viewport in CSS”

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 “CSS Animation Libraries”

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 “Animating with Clip-Path”

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 “Reduced Motion Picture Technique, Take Two”

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 “Integrating Third-Party Animation Libraries to a Project”

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 “Revisiting prefers-reduced-motion, the reduced motion media query”