Web Animation With HTML, JavaScript & Angular

A while back, websites used to focus on displaying correct information to the visitors without paying much attention to the visual experience to create a user-friendly site. However, a lot of things have changed over time, with website owners now developing visuals to retain users on their site.

The developers have realized that humans tend to pay more attention to moving objects because of our natural reflex to notice movement.

In general, adding animation to your site or application is an important method for drawing users’ attention to critical areas of your website and revealing additional necessary information. Also, an effective animation helps you create a strong connection between users and the content of your website.

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What is web animation?

Website animations basically help you make things move on the Internet.

Web animations are required to design engaging websites that provide better and faster conversion as well as attract users to click, browse, and buy things from your online store.

With the right design, they can add valuable interaction, enhance users’ emotional experience, and also add personality to your website interface.

Nowadays, there are thousands of javascript angular libraries, tools, and plugins that can be utilized to create animations, from simple to complex. Moreover, with the help of CSS Animation, you can also avoid those unnecessary plugins that tend to slow down the speed of your website.

What CSS properties can you animate?

It’s one thing to know how to animate, and it’s a totally different thing to know what to animate.

Some CSS properties are easy to animate, which means they can be used in animation and transitions.

There are also properties that can gradually change from one value to another, such as size, color, numbers, shape, percentage, etc.

You are free to animate properties like background, background color, border color, filter, flexibility, and font.

Different types of animation

There are various types of animation that go very well on websites and play a significant role in the user experience.

Tool tips

Tooltips are text labels that appear when the user hovers the mouse pointer over them, focuses on a part, or taps an element.

In a nutshell, it is a short informative message that appears when the user interacts with an item in the graphical user interface (GUI). Tooltips often contain quick help text about their function.

Hover

The hover pseudo-class is used to add special effects to the part when you hover over it. Thus it provides site owners with the ability to grab visitors’ attention as soon as they hover over an element. In addition, it is a very effective way to show which elements are clickable.

Loading

Downloads are highly essential because they help entertain the user while downloading. They are also used to inform visitors about the level of progress or how much time is left before the download is complete.

Input

Input animations are an excellent tool and are often combined with tooltips and validations. It allows users to quickly correct errors and fills in the missing field to complete forms with the help of input data.

Menu

Menu animation plays a significant role in UI/UX. They are often used to surprise the user and make them interactive, allowing them to visit all the content on the page. There are various other animations like page transition, parallax, etc.

CSS animation

Till now, we have talked about various animations that can be programmed with the help of CSS. However, we haven’t explained how.

CSS allows programmers to animate HTML elements without using JavaScript.

To use CSS animation, it is necessary to specify a few keyframes first for the animation. Usually, they contain styles that an element will display at a specific time.

Tips for animating with CSS and JavaScript

As we discussed earlier, animations are essential for developing engaging websites and applications. Also, while interacting with them, users expect instant responsiveness and interactivity.

In traditional animation, the character movement starts slowly and then picks up pace, it is called “slow in”, and vice versa is called “slow out”. Over the Internet, such motion options are called “ease in” and “ease-out”. From the above example, it is clear that changing the speed is a process aimed at softening the animation.

Smoothness for simple animation is achieved with the CSS property transition and with the help of javascript angular animation. Such a feature can be used to make the button smoothly transform its background color with the hover of the mouse pointer.

Notes:

1. Animations without any smooth movement are called linear animations.
2. Ease-in animations begin slowly and end quickly.
3. Ease-out animation begins quickly and ends gradually.
4. An animation with two keywords in and out at once is like accelerating and decelerating a car and can give a pretty interesting effect.

Animations with CSS and JavaScript

There are two primary ways to create animations in the browser: using Javascript and CSS. Which is better? The answer depends on the specifics of the project. Here are some tips to make smart choice

• You should prefer CSS if you have small offline states for UI elements.
• Prefer JavaScript if you want more controlled animation.

Animation tips

1. Try to use CSS animations more often than JavaScript, as the browser engine can optimize them ahead of time with the GPU.
2. Ease-out animation is usually the right choice and a good default. It launches quickly and creates more responsive animation by adding a nice slow down at the end.
3. Ease-out duration should be around 200-500ms – the optimum time for the perception of the animation eye.
4. For ease-in animation, the timing duration should be in-between 200-500ms. It will cause an abrupt stop at the end of the animation, and no time changes will be able to soften it.
5. The basic rule is a quick response to the visitor’s actions.
6. Novice programmers should use various libraries to handle complex animation tasks such as javascript angular libraries, GSAP, animate.css, and many more.
7. Make a habit of including CSS property “will-change” to let the browser understand what exactly you are planning to animate.

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