Tags: animation

Hertzsprung-Russell diagram animation | ESA/Hubble

When I was in Düsseldorf for this year’s excellent Beyond Tellerrand conference, I had the pleasure of meeting Nadieh Bremer, data visualisation designer extraordinaire. I asked her a question which is probably the equivalent of asking a chef what their favourite food is: “what’s your favourite piece of data visualisation?”

There are plenty of popular answers to this question—the Minard map, Jon Snow’s cholera map—but we had just been chatting about Nadieh’s previous life in astronomy, so one answer popped immediately to mind: the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

Responsive Design for Motion | WebKit

A really great overview of using prefers-reduced-motion to tone down CSS animations.

This post was written by James Craig, and I’m going to take this opportunity to say a big “thank you!” to James for all the amazing accessibility work he has been doing at Apple through the years. The guy’s a goddamn hero!

Electronic Items

I love the way Guillaume Kurkdjian uses animation here to demonstrate how these gadgets from the ’90s would work.

Scrolling on the web: A primer - Microsoft Edge Dev BlogMicrosoft Edge Dev Blog

A ludicrously deep dive by Nolan into how scrolling works in web browsers. No, wait, come back! It’s more interesting than it sounds …and it certainly isn’t as simple as you might think.

For instance, do you know the difference between the following scenarios?

• User scrolls with two fingers on a touch pad
• User scrolls with one finger on a touch screen
• User scrolls with a mouse wheel on a physical mouse
• User clicks the sidebar and drags it up and down
• User presses up, down, PageUp, PageDown, or spacebar keys on a keyboard

If you ask the average web user (or even the average web developer!) they might tell you that these interactions are all equivalent. The truth is far more interesting.

This comes complete with lovely animated illustrations by Rachel.

Functional Minimalism for Web Design

According to this, the forthcoming Clearleft redesign will be totally on fleek.

CSS Beating Heart Tutorial. – Cassie Codes

A sweet CSS tutorial that Cassie put together for the Valentine’s Day Codebar.

An Introduction to the Reduced Motion Media Query | CSS-Tricks

A new media query that will help prevent you making your users hurl.

Xaviera López

Beautiful animation work.

KUTE.js | Javascript Animation Engine

This looks like an interesting little JavaScript library for scripting animations.

kdzwinel/progress-bar-animation: Making a Doughnut Progress Bar - research notes

This is a thorough write-up of an interesting case where SVG looks like the right tool for the job, but further research leads to some sad-making conclusions.

I love SVG. It’s elegant, scalable and works everywhere. It’s perfect for mobile… as long as it doesn’t move. There is no way to animate it smoothly on Android.

Building Social: A Case Study On Progressive Enhancement – Smashing Magazine

A step-by-step walkthrough of layering on enhancements to a site. The article shows the code used, but it isn’t really the code that matters—it’s the thought and planning that went into it.

Is animation “just” an enhancement? + WebGL effects & SVG paths explained - The UI Animation Newsletter  #16.30

Yes! Yes! Yes! Val nails the essence of progressive enhancement:

Never feel like it’s a waste to dedicate time to the enhancements; to put real thought and effort into your animations and what they’ll contribute to the experience. Progressive enhancement is all about freeing up your time to make the enhancements great once you’ve got that basic core functionality covered. That’s the path to making new and wonderful things on the web while also being responsible. It’s quite literally a way to get the best of both worlds.

GreenSock | “will-change” must change? Animators beware.

This will-change property that was intended to SOLVE problems for animators may end up doing the opposite.

It seems wise for the browsers to step back and let the spec authors fill in the implementation details and gain consensus before moving forward.

Web Animation Workshops

Val Head and Sarah Drasner have teamed up to offer a two-day workshop on web animation. If you have a chance to attend, do it!

Revisionist History Podcast

Malcolm Gladwell’s new podcast is very good: perfect for huffduffing. And I really, really like the website—lovely typography, illustrations, and subtle animations.

Sign O’ The Times - original video in pure CSS

This is quite wonderful: a recreation of the video for Prince’s Sign O’ The Times made entirely with HTML and CSS.

RAFP: a proposal for performance measurements through requestAnimationFrame - QuirksBlog

Here’s an interesting proposal from ppk: use requestAnimationFrame to gauge how performant a browser in behaving and then enhance accordingly.

hunt

This looks like it could be quite a handy (and relatively lightweight) script for attaching events—like animations—to an item’s visibility, so the events only trigger when the item is scrolled into view.

Jeremy Kard

You can do anything with CSS these days.

Revisiting the Float Label pattern with CSS — That Emil is Emil Björklund

A clever technique by Emil to implement the “float label” pattern using CSS. It all hinges on browsers supporting the :placeholder-shown pseudo-class which, alas, is not universal.

I was hoping that maybe @supports could come to the rescue (so that a better fallback could be crafted), but that tests for properties and values, not selectors. Damn!