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How Film School Helped Me Make Better User Experiences
12.11.2020
Recently, I finished a sixty-day sprint where I posted hand-coded zombie themed CSS animation every day. I learned a lot, but it also took me back to film school and reminded me of so many things I learned about storytelling, cinematography, and art.
Turns out that much of what I learned back then...
Lessons Learned from Sixty Days of Re-Animating Zombies with Hand-Coded CSS
16.9.2020
I’ll be linking to individual Pens as I discuss the lessons I learned, but if you’d like to get a sense of the entire project, check out 60 days of Animation on Undead Institute. I started this project to end on August 1st, 2020, coinciding with the publication of a book I wrote featuring...
Ground Rules for Web Animations
31.8.2020
Animations can make a site stand out. Or, they can just as easily kill the experience. When working with web animations, there are a few things that could go wrong like adding animations that serve no purpose, setting durations that are  too long or too quick, or not using right type...
Timer Bars in CSS with Custom Properties
18.8.2020
I was working on a thing the other day that needed a visible timer. There was UI precedent for this type of timer on the project. People didn’t want to see numbers ticking downward; it was more ideal to see a “bar” drain away from full to empty. I mention that because there...
Line-Animated Hamburger Menu
26.6.2020
This kind of SVG + CSS animation trickery is catnip to me. Mikael Ainalem shares how to draw a hamburger icon (the “three lines” thing you’re well familiar with), but then animate it in a way that is surprising and fun by controlling the SVG properties in CSS.
CodePen Embed...
CSS Animation Timelines: Building a Rube Goldberg Machine
12.5.2020
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...
How to Re-Create a Nifty Netflix Animation in CSS
7.4.2020
The design for Netflix’s browse page has remained pretty similar for a few years now. One mainstay component is the preview slider that allows users to scroll through content and hover on items to see a preview.
One unique characteristic of the UI is its hover behavior. When a show preview...
Animated Matryoshka Dolls in CSS
27.2.2020
Here’s a fun one. How might we create a set of those cool Matryoshka dolls where they nest inside one another... but in CSS?
I toyed with this idea in my head for a little while. Then, I saw a tweet from CSS-Tricks and the article image had the dolls. I took that as a sign! It was time to...
Weaving a Line Through Text in CSS
26.2.2020
Earlier this year, I came across this demo by Florin Pop, which makes a line go either over or under the letters of a single line heading. I thought this was a cool idea, but there were a few little things about the implementation I felt I could simplify and improve at the same time.
First off,...
Pac-Man… in CSS!
11.11.2019
You all know famous Pac-Man video game, right? The game is fun and building an animated Pac-Man character in HTML and CSS is just as fun! I’ll show you how to create one while leveraging the powers of the clip-path property.
See the Pen
Animated Pac-Man by Maks Akymenko (@maximakymenko)
...
The Trick to Animating the Dot on the Letter “i”
4.11.2019
Here’s the trick: by combining the Turkish letter "ı" and the period "." we can create something that looks like the letter "i," but is made from two separate elements. This opens us up to some fun options to style or animate the dot of the letter independently from the stalk. Worried about...
Are There Random Numbers in CSS?
29.10.2019
CSS allows you to create dynamic layouts and interfaces on the web, but as a language, it is static: once a value is set, it cannot be changed. The idea of randomness is off the table. Generating random numbers at runtime is the territory of JavaScript, not so much CSS. Or is it? If we factor in...
Digging Into the Preview Loading Animation in WordPress
22.10.2019
WordPress shipped the Block Editor (aka Gutenberg) back in version 5.0 and with it came a snazzy new post preview screen that shows the WordPress logo drawing itself while the preview loads.
That's what you get when saving a post draft and clicking the "Preview" button in the editor. How'd they...
Using Custom Properties to Wrangle Variations in Keyframe Animations
12.9.2019
Have you ever wondered how to customize CSS animations keyframes without using any preprocessor feature, like mixins? I keep reaching for preprocessors for this reason, but it would so nice to drop yet one more dependency and go with vanilla CSS.
Well, I found a way to account for variations within...
Bounce Element Around Viewport in CSS
19.8.2019
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 —...
CSS Animation Libraries
22.7.2019
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...
Collective #528
1.7.2019
Bounds.js * CSS Animation Worklet API * Numverify * HTML can do that? * Using Basis Textures in Three.js
Collective #528 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops
Different Approaches for Creating a Staggered Animation
27.6.2019
Animating elements, at its most basic, is fairly straightforward. Define the keyframes. Name the animation. Call it on an element.
But sometimes we need something a little more complex to get the right “feel" for the way things move. For example, a sound equalizer might use the same animation...
Different Approaches for Creating a Staggered Animation
27.6.2019
Animating elements, at its most basic, is fairly straightforward. Define the keyframes. Name the animation. Call it on an element.
But sometimes we need something a little more complex to get the right “feel" for the way things move. For example, a sound equalizer might use the same animation...
A Course About CSS Layout and Animations
6.6.2019
Christina Gorton just released a new course called CSS Layout and Animations as a part of Design+Code, which is a $9/month. That includes a ton of video training on everything from stuff like this to React to Sketch to iOS development... and beyond!
Christina approaches the course with my favorite...