Unleash the power of scroll-driven animations

Here’s a great video course about the power of scroll driven animations by Bramus and he takes what we already know about CSS animations but gets into the nitty gritty new-ness of binding these fancy animations to the reader’s scrolling behavior.

Speaking of which, here’s Bramus writing about them in his ever-so-excellent demo page from a while back:

Scroll-driven animations are a common UX pattern on the web. These are animations that are linked to the scroll position of a scroll container. This means that as you scroll up or down, the linked animation scrubs forward or backward in direct response. Think of interesting effects such as parallax background images or reading indicators which move as you scroll.

What clicked for me in Bramus’s video series is that with CSS alone we can now detect if an element is visible in its “scrollport” and then animate it in or out or upside down. So it’s not just about adding big, fancy (and often annoying!) animations to the page. Instead, I think subtle examples like this stacking card effect is where scroll-driven animations are going to really shine. But that’s just my hunch!

Either way, I’m extremely excited about all this stuff because I think it’ll lead to more performant scrolling animations but it also unlocks untold power for us web designers to make subtle visual changes to the reading experience.