For decades, animation has evolved and expanded into movies, gaming, and videos. It’s helped produce some of the hottest products in the entertainment and gaming industries. One area that may be a little underutilized is incorporating animations into websites.
Visuals and overall appearances have become key elements people focus on with any kind of technology or advertisement. Thus, making a website in the same fashion is recommended. Adding animations to it will give the website a unique touch and potentially increase traffic to the site. While that may sound amazing, creating animations is a little more complicated.
It Starts with Development
Creating animations begins at the source of every website and app development—the programming. The animation itself is a part of the front-end tools necessary for any kind of development. JavaScript can be a great fit for animation projects that are complicated, which also means it will take more skills and effort to generate appealing animations.
Defining Animations
Its name should give it away but, animation is the process of making digitally constructed models appear in motion. They can be in 2-D or 3-D and have a number of different advantages such as:
- Holding users’ attention
- Improving engagement levels
- Awareness for good quality work
The Best JavaScript Libraries
- AnimeJS
Made famous through GitHub, AnimeJS is powerful, simplistic in nature and navigation, and can animate various types of codes.
- VelocityJS
Similar to JQuery, VelocityJS has excellent performance functions, no issues with system compatibility, and utilizes the best features from JQuery and CSS.
- Bounce
Bounce is a JavaScript animation library known for its light-hearted, Hollywood-style animations. The library is slightly smaller than others but great for fast and smooth animations.
- Popmotion
This is similar to React and ThreeJS in that Popmotion’s function with an API allows it to accept numbers in its code. Like Bounce, Popmotion is a smaller library, however, it includes various extra animation features.
- GreenSockJS
GreenSockJS works alongside web browsers to make animations more fluid and visually-appealing. It can connect several animation elements seamlessly, as well as fixing any bugs if necessary. Also, it’s easily compatible with programming languages like HTML, JQuery, Canvas, and CSS.
Other Libraries
Among the long list of JavaScript libraries that pop up every few years, there are others like AnimateJS, Magic Animations, Lottie, CSShake, Mo.js, TypedJS, and AniJS.
Summary
Animations aren’t considered necessary elements in the website development process, though they can add the right kind of touch that makes a big difference. Not only has current society drifted toward a focus on visuals, anything that isn’t nice to look at may be ignored. A level of professionalism is important to think about too for any company hoping to animate their website. Minimalistic or specifically unique animations should be the main goal for a business. They typically don’t include very many animations since it would distract visitors. Alternatively, personal websites could go the opposite direction.
The possibilities for how to use animations to improve a website are only as limited as the creativity and skill set of the person doing the animating. That’s why there are helpful tools like these JavaScript libraries to make it possible for less experienced developers to create amazing animations on their own.
