Flourishing Logo Designs by Martin Schmetzer

Post pobrano z: Flourishing Logo Designs by Martin Schmetzer

In an era where minimalist designs are praised, Martin Schmetzer’s work really stand out with all its details and flourishing letters.

Based in Stockholm, the illustrator and designer specializes in typographic illustration and design. The samples of work you can see in this post are only a part of his branding work, you can see packaging, labels, and much more on his portfolio website.

Flourishing Logo Designs by Martin Schmetzer

Post pobrano z: Flourishing Logo Designs by Martin Schmetzer

In an era where minimalist designs are praised, Martin Schmetzer’s work really stand out with all its details and flourishing letters.

Based in Stockholm, the illustrator and designer specializes in typographic illustration and design. The samples of work you can see in this post are only a part of his branding work, you can see packaging, labels, and much more on his portfolio website.

Design Deals for the Week

Post pobrano z: Design Deals for the Week

Every week, we’ll give you an overview of the best deals for designers, make sure you don’t miss any by subscribing to our deals feed. You can also follow the recently launched website Type Deals if you are looking for free fonts or font deals.

UX and Sitemap Resource Bundle

This bundle of bundles is perfect for any startup company or project. The UX Web Tiles for Flow Diagrams and Sitemaps easily lets you prototype and UX Design with 150 different Web tiles. The Sketching Templates Bundle lets you grab your favorite drawing instrument and hand sketch your projects user flow no matter the device. And finally, a bonus set of legal documents from client agreements to confidentiality papers rounds out this essential deal.

$24 instead of $466 – Get it now!

Clearance Sale Up to 70%

Awesome discounts up to 70% off on TemplateMonster Marketplace: WordPress themes, eCommerce templates, graphics, assets & plugins. Grab everything for your next project.

Sale starts: 19th of February

60+ Best Selling Fonts from MLKWSN Studio

It’s time for another font-astic deal! From MLKWSN Studio, this gorgeous bundle is stuffed with 62 unique fonts at one super low price! Mix and match styles with these beautiful typefaces that are the perfect answer to any project from logo design to wedding invitations.

$9 instead of $238 – Get it now!

Delight Script Modern Calligraphy Typeface

Delight Script is a beautiful modern calligraphy typeface packed with over 400 unique glyphs. The family consists of 4 fonts (Script, Script Slant, Sans, Sans Slant), each loaded with OpenType features from swashes to alternates. Toss in multi-lingual support and an extended license, and you’ll be delighted at the true flexibility of this find.

$7 instead of $15 – Get it now!

79 Photo-Realistic Packaging Mockups

Showcase your branding and packaging designs in a professional manner with this set of 79 photo-realistic packaging mockups from ZippyPixels. With organized layers, it’s a snap to customize shadows, colors, light effects, backgrounds and your main image. Quickly whip up a perfect presentation on anything from glass jars to drawstring bags.

$17 instead of $39 – Get it now!

Design Deals for the Week

Post pobrano z: Design Deals for the Week

Every week, we’ll give you an overview of the best deals for designers, make sure you don’t miss any by subscribing to our deals feed. You can also follow the recently launched website Type Deals if you are looking for free fonts or font deals.

UX and Sitemap Resource Bundle

This bundle of bundles is perfect for any startup company or project. The UX Web Tiles for Flow Diagrams and Sitemaps easily lets you prototype and UX Design with 150 different Web tiles. The Sketching Templates Bundle lets you grab your favorite drawing instrument and hand sketch your projects user flow no matter the device. And finally, a bonus set of legal documents from client agreements to confidentiality papers rounds out this essential deal.

$24 instead of $466 – Get it now!

Clearance Sale Up to 70%

Awesome discounts up to 70% off on TemplateMonster Marketplace: WordPress themes, eCommerce templates, graphics, assets & plugins. Grab everything for your next project.

Sale starts: 19th of February

60+ Best Selling Fonts from MLKWSN Studio

It’s time for another font-astic deal! From MLKWSN Studio, this gorgeous bundle is stuffed with 62 unique fonts at one super low price! Mix and match styles with these beautiful typefaces that are the perfect answer to any project from logo design to wedding invitations.

$9 instead of $238 – Get it now!

Delight Script Modern Calligraphy Typeface

Delight Script is a beautiful modern calligraphy typeface packed with over 400 unique glyphs. The family consists of 4 fonts (Script, Script Slant, Sans, Sans Slant), each loaded with OpenType features from swashes to alternates. Toss in multi-lingual support and an extended license, and you’ll be delighted at the true flexibility of this find.

$7 instead of $15 – Get it now!

79 Photo-Realistic Packaging Mockups

Showcase your branding and packaging designs in a professional manner with this set of 79 photo-realistic packaging mockups from ZippyPixels. With organized layers, it’s a snap to customize shadows, colors, light effects, backgrounds and your main image. Quickly whip up a perfect presentation on anything from glass jars to drawstring bags.

$17 instead of $39 – Get it now!

CSS Variables + calc() + rgb() = Enforcing High Contrast Colors

Post pobrano z: CSS Variables + calc() + rgb() = Enforcing High Contrast Colors

As you may know, the recent updates and additions to CSS are extremely powerful. From Flexbox to Grid, and — what we’re concerned about here — Custom Properties (aka CSS variables), all of which make robust and dynamic layouts and interfaces easier than ever while opening up many other possibilities we used to only dream of.

The other day, I was thinking that there must be a way to use Custom Properties to color an element’s background while maintaining a contrast with the foreground color that is high enough (using either white or black) to pass WCAG AA accessibility standards.

It’s astonishingly efficient to do this in JavaScript with a few lines of code:

var rgb = [255, 0, 0];

function setForegroundColor() {
  var sum = Math.round(((parseInt(rgb[0]) * 299) + (parseInt(rgb[1]) * 587) + (parseInt(rgb[2]) * 114)) / 1000);
  return (sum > 128) ? 'black' : 'white';
}

This takes the red, green and blue (RGB) values of an element’s background color, multiplies them by some special numbers (299, 587, and 144, respectively), adds them together, then divides the total by 1,000. When that sum is greater than 128, it will return black; otherwise, we’ll get white. Not too bad.

The only problem is, when it comes to recreating this in CSS, we don’t have access to a native if statement to evaluate the sum. So,how can we replicate this in CSS without one?

Luckily, like HTML, CSS can be very forgiving. If we pass a value greater than 255 into the RGB function, it will get capped at 255. Same goes for numbers lower than 0. Even negative integers will get capped at 0. So, instead of testing whether our sum is greater or less than 128, we subtract 128 from our sum, giving us either a positive or negative integer. Then, if we multiply it by a large negative value (e.g. -1,000), we end up with either very large positive or negative values that we can then pass into the RGB function. Like I said earlier, this will get capped to the browser’s desired values.

Here is an example using CSS variables:

:root {
  --red: 28;
  --green: 150;
  --blue: 130;

  --accessible-color: calc(
    (
      (
        (var(--red) * 299) +
        (var(--green) * 587) +
        (var(--blue) * 114) /
        1000
      ) - 128
    ) * -1000
  );
}

.button {
  color:
    rgb(
      var(--accessible-color),
      var(--accessible-color),
      var(--accessible-color)
    );
  background-color:
    rgb(
      var(--red),
      var(--green),
      var(--blue)
    );
}

If my math is correct (and it’s very possible that it’s not) we get a total of 16,758, which is much greater than 255. Pass this total into the rgb() function for all three values, and the browser will set the text color to white.

At this point, everything seems to be working in both Chrome and Firefox, but Safari is a little cranky and gives a different result. At first, I thought this might be because Safari was not capping the large values I was providing in the function, but after some testing, I found that Safari didn’t like the division in my calculation for some reason.

Taking a closer look at the calc() function, I noticed that I could remove the division of 1,000 by increasing the value of 128 to 128,000. Here’s how that looks so far:

:root {
  --red: 28;
  --green: 150;
  --blue: 130;

  --accessible-color: calc(
    (
      (
        (var(--red) * 299) +
        (var(--green) * 587) +
        (var(--blue) * 114)
      ) - 128000 /* HIGHLIGHT */
    ) * -1000
  );
}

.button {
  color:
    rgb(
      var(--accessible-color),
      var(--accessible-color),
      var(--accessible-color)
    );
  background-color:
    rgb(
      var(--red),
      var(--green),
      var(--blue)
    );
}

Throw in a few range sliders to adjust the color values, and there you have it: a dynamic UI element that can swap text color based on its background-color while maintaining a passing grade with WCAG AA.

See the Pen
CSS Only Accessible Button
by Josh Bader (@joshbader)
on CodePen.

Putting this concept to practical use

Below is a Pen showing how this technique can be used to theme a user interface. I have duplicated and moved the --accessible-color variable into the specific CSS rules that require it, and to help ensure backgrounds remain accessible based on their foregrounds, I have multiplied the --accessible-color variable by -1 in several places. The colors can be changed by using the controls located at the bottom-right. Click the cog/gear icon to access them.

See the Pen
CSS Variable Accessible UI
by Josh Bader (@joshbader)
on CodePen.

There are other ways to do this

A little while back, Facundo Corradini explained how to do something very similar in this post. He uses a slightly different calculation in combination with the hsl function. He also goes into detail about some of the issues he was having while coming up with the concept:

Some hues get really problematic (particularly yellows and cyans), as they are displayed way brighter than others (e.g. reds and blues) despite having the same lightness value. In consequence, some colors are treated as dark and given white text despite being extremely bright.

What in the name of CSS is going on?

He goes on to mention that Edge wasn’t capping his large numbers, and during my testing, I noticed that sometimes it was working and other times it was not. If anyone can pinpoint why this might be, feel free to share in the comments.

Further, Ana Tudor explains how using filter + mix-blend-mode can help contrast text against more complex backgrounds. And, when I say complex, I mean complex. She even goes so far as to demonstrate how text color can change as pieces of the background color change — pretty awesome!

Also, Robin Rendle explains how to use mix-blend-mode along with pseudo elements to automatically reverse text colors based on their background-color.

So, count this as yet another approach to throw into the mix. It’s incredibly awesome that Custom Properties open up these sorts of possibilities for us while allowing us to solve the same problem in a variety of ways.

The post CSS Variables + calc() + rgb() = Enforcing High Contrast Colors appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Writing Animations That Bring Your Site to Life

Post pobrano z: Writing Animations That Bring Your Site to Life

Web animation is one of the factors that can strongly enhance your website’s look and feel. Sadly, unlike mobile apps, there aren’t as many websites using animation to their benefit as you would think. We don’t want to count yours among those, so this article is for you and anyone else looking for ways to use animation for a better user experience! Specifically, we’re going to learn how to make web interactions delightful using CSS animations.

Here’s what we’re going to build together:


Before we move ahead, it’s worth mentioning that I’m going to assume you have at least some familiarity with modern front-end frameworks and a basic understanding of CSS animations. If you don’t, then no fear! CSS-Tricks has a great guides on React and Vue, as well as a thorough almanac post on the CSS animation property.

Good? OK, let’s talk about why we’d want to use animation in the first place and cover some baseline information about CSS animations.

Why would we to animate anything?

We could probably do an entire post on this topic alone. Oh, wait! Sarah Drasner already did that and her points are both poignant and compelling.

But, to sum things up based on my own experiences:

  • Animations enhance the way users interact with an interface. For example, smart animations can reduce cognitive load by giving users better context between page transitions.
  • They can provide clear cues to users, like where we want them to focus attention.
  • Animations serve as another design pattern in and of themselves, helping users to get emotionally attached to and engage with the interface.
  • Another benefit of using animations is that they can create a perception that a site or app loads faster than it actually does.

A couple of house rules with animations

Have you ever bumped into a site that animates all the things? Wow, those can be jarring. So, here’s a couple of things to avoid when working with animations so our app doesn’t fall into the same boat:

  • Avoid animating CSS properties other than transform and opacity. If other properties have to be animated, like width or height, then make sure there aren’t a lot of layout changes happening at the same time. There’s actually a cost to animations and you can see exactly how much by referring to CSS Triggers.
  • Also, just because animations can create perceived performance gains, there’s actually a point of diminishing return when it comes to using them. Animating too many elements at the same time may result in decreased performance.

Now we can get our hands dirty with some code!

Let’s build a music app

We’re going to build the music app we looked at earlier, which is inspired by Aurélien Salomon’s Dribbble shot. I chose this example so that we can focus on animations, not only within a component, but also between different routes. We’ll build this app using Vue and create animations using vanilla (i.e. no framework) CSS.

Animations should go hand-in-hand with UI development. Creating UI before defining their movement is likely to cost much more time. In this case, the Dribbble shot provides that scope for us.

Let’s start with the development.

Step 1: Spin up the app locally

First things first. We need to set up a new Vue project. Again, we’re assuming some base-level understanding of Vue here, so please check out the Learning Vue guide for more info on setting up.

We need a couple of dependencies for our work, notably vue-router for transitioning between views and sass-loader so we can write in Sass and compile to CSS. Here’s a detailed tutorial on using routes and Sass can be installed by pointing the command line at the project directory and using npm install -D sass-loader node-sass.

We have what we need!

Step 2: Setting up routes

For creating routes, we’re first going to create two bare minimum components — Artists.vue and Tracks.vue. We’ll drop a new file in the src folder called router.js and add routes for these components as:

import Vue from 'vue'
import Router from 'vue-router'
import Artists from './components/Artists.vue'
import Tracks from './components/Tracks.vue'

Vue.use(Router)
export default new Router({
	mode: 'history',
	routes: [
		{
			path: '/',
			name: 'artists',
			component: Artists
		},
		{
			path: '/:id',
			name: 'tracks',
			component: Tracks
		}
	]
})

Import router.js into the main.js and inject it to the Vue instance. Lastly, replace the content of your App.vue by <router-view/>.

Step 3: Create the components and content for the music app

We need two components that we’ll transition between with animation. Those are going to be:

  1. Artists.vue: a grid of artists
  2. Tracks.vue: An artist image with a back button

If you wanna jump ahead a bit, here are some assets to work with:

  1. Images and sample data in JSON format.
  2. Content for the components

When all is said and done, the two views will come out to something like this:

Artists.vue (left) and Tracks.vue (right)

Step 4: Animate!

Here we are, the part we’ve really wanted to get to all this time. The most important animation in the app is transitioning from Artists to Tracks when clicking on an artist. It should feel seamless where clicking on an artist image puts that image in focus while transitioning from one view into the next. This is exactly the type of animation that we rarely see in apps but can drastically reduce cognitive load for users.

To make sure we’re all on the same page, we’re going to refer to the first image in the sequence as the “previous” image and the second one as the „current” image. Getting the effect down is relatively easy as long as we know the dimensions and position of the previous image in the transition. We can animate the current image by transforming it as per previous image.

The formula that I’m using is transform: translate(x, y) scale(n), where n is equal to the size of previous image divided by the size of current image. Note that we can use a static value of n since the dimensions are fixed for all the images. For example, the image size in the Artists view is 190x190 and 240x240 in the Tracks view. Thus, we can replace n by 190/240 = 0.791. That means the transform value becomes translate(x, y) scale(0.791) in our equation.

Animating from Artists to Tracks

Next thing is to find x and y. We can get these values though click event in the Artists view as:

const {x, y} = event.target.getBoundingClientRect()

…and then send these values to the Tracks view, all while switching the route. Since we aren’t using any state management library, the two components will communicate via their parent component, which is the top level component, App.vue. In App.vue, let’s create a method that switches the route and sends the image info as params.

gotoTracks(position, artistId) {
	this.$router.push({
		name: 'tracks',
		params: {
			id: artistId,
			position: position
		}
	})
}

Here’s the relevant code from the repo to reference, in case you’re interested.

Since we have received the position and ID of the image in Tracks, we have all the required data to show and animate it. We’ll first fetch artist information (specifically the name and image URL) using artist ID.

To animate the image, we need to calculate the transform value from the image’s starting position. To set the transform value, I’m using CSS custom properties, which can be done with CSS-in-JS techniques as well. Note that the image’s position that we received through props will be relative to window. Therefore we’ll have to subtract some fixed offset caused by the padding of the container <div> to even out our math.

const { x, y } = this.$route.params.position
// padding-left
const offsetLeft = 100
// padding-top
const offsetTop = 30

// Set CSS custom property value
document.documentElement.style.setProperty(
	'--translate', 
	`translate(${x - offsetLeft}px, ${y - offsetTop}px) scale(0.792)`
)

We’ll use this value to create a keyframe animation to move the image:

@keyframes move-image {
	from {
		transform: var(--translate);
	}
}

This gets assigned to the CSS animation:

.image {
	animation: move-image 0.6s;
}

…and it will animate the image from this transform value to its original position on component load.

Transitioning from Artists to Tracks

We can use the same technique when going the opposite direction, Tracks to Artists. As we already have the clicked image’s position stored in the parent component, we can pass it to props for Artists as well.

Transitioning from Tracks to Artists

Step 5: Show the tracks!

It’s great that we can now move between our two views seamlessly, but the Tracks view is pretty sparse at the moment. So let’s add the track list for the selected artist.

We’ll create an empty white box and a new keyframe to slide it upwards on page load. Then we’ll add three subsections to it: Recent Tracks, Popular Tracks, and Playlist. Again, if you want to jump ahead, feel free to either reference or copy the final code from the repo.

The Tracks view with content

Recent Tracks is the row of thumbnails just below the artist image where each thumbnail includes the track name and track length below it. Since we’re covering animations here, we’ll create a scale-up animation, where the image starts invisible (opacity: 0) and a little smaller than it’s natural size (scale(0.7)), then is revealed (opacity: 1 )and scales up to its natural size (transform: none).

.track {
	opacity: 0;
	transform: scale(0.7);
	animation: scale-up 1s ease forwards;
}

@keyframes scale-up {
	to {
		opacity: 1;
		transform: none;
	}
}

The Popular Tracks list and Playlist sit side-by-side below the Recent Tracks, where Popular tracks takes up most of the space. We can slide them up a bit on initial view with another set of keyframes:

.track {
	...
	animation: slide-up 1.5s;
}

@keyframes slide-up {
	from {
		transform: translateY(140px);
	}
}

To make the animation feel more natural, we’ll create a stagger effect so the Recent Tracks lead a little ahead of the Popular Tracks and Playlist using an incremental animation delay to each item.

@for $i from 1 to 5 {
	&:nth-child(#{$i + 1}) {
		animation-delay: #{$i * 0.05}s;
	}
}

The code above is basically looking for each child element, then adding a 0.05 second delay to each element it finds. So, for example, the first child gets a 0.05 second delay, the second child gets a 0.10 second delay and so on.

Check out how nice and natural this all looks:

Bonus: micro-interactions!

One of the fun things about working with animations is thinking through the small details because they’re what tie things together and add delight to the user experience. We call these micro-interactions and they serve a good purpose by providing visual feedback when an action is performed.

Depending on the complexity of the animations, we might need a library like anime.js or GSAP. This example is pretty straightforward, so we can accomplish everything we need by writing some CSS.

First micro-interaction: The volume icon

Let’s first get a volume icon in SVG format (Noun Project and Material Design are good sources). On click, we’ll animate-in and out its path element to show the level of volume. For this, we’ll create a method which switches its CSS class according to the volume level.

<svg @click="changeVolume">
	<g :class="`level-${volumeLevel}`">
		<path d="..."/> <!-- volume level 1 -->
		<path d="..."/> <!-- volume level 2 -->
		<path d="..."/> <!-- volume level 3 -->
		<polygon points="..."/>
	</g>
</svg>

Based on this class, we can show and hide certain path elements as:

path {
	opacity: 0;
	transform-origin: left;
	transform: translateX(-5px) scale(0.6);
	transition: transform 0.25s, opacity 0.2s;
}

.level-1 path:first-child,
.level-2 path:first-child,
.level-2 path:nth-child(2),
.level-3 path {
	opacity: 1;
	transform: none;
}
The animated volume control

Second micro-interaction: The favorite icon

Do you like it when you click on Twitter’s heart button? That’s because it feels unique and special by the way it animates on click. We’ll make something similar but real quick. For this, we first get an SVG heart icon and add it to the the markup. Then we’ll add a bouncy animation to it that’s triggered on click.

@keyframes bounce {
	0%, 100% {
		transform: none;
	}
	30% {
		transform: scale(1.3);
	}
	60% {
		transform: scale(0.9);
	}
}

Another fun thing we can do is add other small heart icons around it with random sizes and positions. Ideally, we’d add a few absolute-positioned HTML elements that a heart as the background. Let’s Arrange each of them as below by setting their left and bottom values.

We’ll also include a fade away effect so the icons appear to dissolve as they move upward by adding a keyframe animation on the same click event.

@keyframes float-upwards {
	0%, 100% {
		opacity: 0;
	}
	50% {
		opacity: 0.7;
	}
	50%, 100% {
		transform: translate(-1px, -5px);
	}
}
The animated favorite button

Summing up

That’s all! I hope you find all this motivating to try animations on your own websites and projects.

While writing this, I also wanted to expand on the fundamental animation principles we glossed over earlier because I believe that they help choose animation durations, and avoid non-meaningful animations. That’s important to discuss because doing animations correctly is better than doing them at all. But this sounds like a whole another topic to be covered in a future article.

The post Writing Animations That Bring Your Site to Life appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

Writing Animations That Bring Your Site to Life

Post pobrano z: Writing Animations That Bring Your Site to Life

Web animation is one of the factors that can strongly enhance your website’s look and feel. Sadly, unlike mobile apps, there aren’t as many websites using animation to their benefit as you would think. We don’t want to count yours among those, so this article is for you and anyone else looking for ways to use animation for a better user experience! Specifically, we’re going to learn how to make web interactions delightful using CSS animations.

Here’s what we’re going to build together:


Before we move ahead, it’s worth mentioning that I’m going to assume you have at least some familiarity with modern front-end frameworks and a basic understanding of CSS animations. If you don’t, then no fear! CSS-Tricks has a great guides on React and Vue, as well as a thorough almanac post on the CSS animation property.

Good? OK, let’s talk about why we’d want to use animation in the first place and cover some baseline information about CSS animations.

Why would we to animate anything?

We could probably do an entire post on this topic alone. Oh, wait! Sarah Drasner already did that and her points are both poignant and compelling.

But, to sum things up based on my own experiences:

  • Animations enhance the way users interact with an interface. For example, smart animations can reduce cognitive load by giving users better context between page transitions.
  • They can provide clear cues to users, like where we want them to focus attention.
  • Animations serve as another design pattern in and of themselves, helping users to get emotionally attached to and engage with the interface.
  • Another benefit of using animations is that they can create a perception that a site or app loads faster than it actually does.

A couple of house rules with animations

Have you ever bumped into a site that animates all the things? Wow, those can be jarring. So, here’s a couple of things to avoid when working with animations so our app doesn’t fall into the same boat:

  • Avoid animating CSS properties other than transform and opacity. If other properties have to be animated, like width or height, then make sure there aren’t a lot of layout changes happening at the same time. There’s actually a cost to animations and you can see exactly how much by referring to CSS Triggers.
  • Also, just because animations can create perceived performance gains, there’s actually a point of diminishing return when it comes to using them. Animating too many elements at the same time may result in decreased performance.

Now we can get our hands dirty with some code!

Let’s build a music app

We’re going to build the music app we looked at earlier, which is inspired by Aurélien Salomon’s Dribbble shot. I chose this example so that we can focus on animations, not only within a component, but also between different routes. We’ll build this app using Vue and create animations using vanilla (i.e. no framework) CSS.

Animations should go hand-in-hand with UI development. Creating UI before defining their movement is likely to cost much more time. In this case, the Dribbble shot provides that scope for us.

Let’s start with the development.

Step 1: Spin up the app locally

First things first. We need to set up a new Vue project. Again, we’re assuming some base-level understanding of Vue here, so please check out the Learning Vue guide for more info on setting up.

We need a couple of dependencies for our work, notably vue-router for transitioning between views and sass-loader so we can write in Sass and compile to CSS. Here’s a detailed tutorial on using routes and Sass can be installed by pointing the command line at the project directory and using npm install -D sass-loader node-sass.

We have what we need!

Step 2: Setting up routes

For creating routes, we’re first going to create two bare minimum components — Artists.vue and Tracks.vue. We’ll drop a new file in the src folder called router.js and add routes for these components as:

import Vue from 'vue'
import Router from 'vue-router'
import Artists from './components/Artists.vue'
import Tracks from './components/Tracks.vue'

Vue.use(Router)
export default new Router({
	mode: 'history',
	routes: [
		{
			path: '/',
			name: 'artists',
			component: Artists
		},
		{
			path: '/:id',
			name: 'tracks',
			component: Tracks
		}
	]
})

Import router.js into the main.js and inject it to the Vue instance. Lastly, replace the content of your App.vue by <router-view/>.

Step 3: Create the components and content for the music app

We need two components that we’ll transition between with animation. Those are going to be:

  1. Artists.vue: a grid of artists
  2. Tracks.vue: An artist image with a back button

If you wanna jump ahead a bit, here are some assets to work with:

  1. Images and sample data in JSON format.
  2. Content for the components

When all is said and done, the two views will come out to something like this:

Artists.vue (left) and Tracks.vue (right)

Step 4: Animate!

Here we are, the part we’ve really wanted to get to all this time. The most important animation in the app is transitioning from Artists to Tracks when clicking on an artist. It should feel seamless where clicking on an artist image puts that image in focus while transitioning from one view into the next. This is exactly the type of animation that we rarely see in apps but can drastically reduce cognitive load for users.

To make sure we’re all on the same page, we’re going to refer to the first image in the sequence as the “previous” image and the second one as the „current” image. Getting the effect down is relatively easy as long as we know the dimensions and position of the previous image in the transition. We can animate the current image by transforming it as per previous image.

The formula that I’m using is transform: translate(x, y) scale(n), where n is equal to the size of previous image divided by the size of current image. Note that we can use a static value of n since the dimensions are fixed for all the images. For example, the image size in the Artists view is 190x190 and 240x240 in the Tracks view. Thus, we can replace n by 190/240 = 0.791. That means the transform value becomes translate(x, y) scale(0.791) in our equation.

Animating from Artists to Tracks

Next thing is to find x and y. We can get these values though click event in the Artists view as:

const {x, y} = event.target.getBoundingClientRect()

…and then send these values to the Tracks view, all while switching the route. Since we aren’t using any state management library, the two components will communicate via their parent component, which is the top level component, App.vue. In App.vue, let’s create a method that switches the route and sends the image info as params.

gotoTracks(position, artistId) {
	this.$router.push({
		name: 'tracks',
		params: {
			id: artistId,
			position: position
		}
	})
}

Here’s the relevant code from the repo to reference, in case you’re interested.

Since we have received the position and ID of the image in Tracks, we have all the required data to show and animate it. We’ll first fetch artist information (specifically the name and image URL) using artist ID.

To animate the image, we need to calculate the transform value from the image’s starting position. To set the transform value, I’m using CSS custom properties, which can be done with CSS-in-JS techniques as well. Note that the image’s position that we received through props will be relative to window. Therefore we’ll have to subtract some fixed offset caused by the padding of the container <div> to even out our math.

const { x, y } = this.$route.params.position
// padding-left
const offsetLeft = 100
// padding-top
const offsetTop = 30

// Set CSS custom property value
document.documentElement.style.setProperty(
	'--translate', 
	`translate(${x - offsetLeft}px, ${y - offsetTop}px) scale(0.792)`
)

We’ll use this value to create a keyframe animation to move the image:

@keyframes move-image {
	from {
		transform: var(--translate);
	}
}

This gets assigned to the CSS animation:

.image {
	animation: move-image 0.6s;
}

…and it will animate the image from this transform value to its original position on component load.

Transitioning from Artists to Tracks

We can use the same technique when going the opposite direction, Tracks to Artists. As we already have the clicked image’s position stored in the parent component, we can pass it to props for Artists as well.

Transitioning from Tracks to Artists

Step 5: Show the tracks!

It’s great that we can now move between our two views seamlessly, but the Tracks view is pretty sparse at the moment. So let’s add the track list for the selected artist.

We’ll create an empty white box and a new keyframe to slide it upwards on page load. Then we’ll add three subsections to it: Recent Tracks, Popular Tracks, and Playlist. Again, if you want to jump ahead, feel free to either reference or copy the final code from the repo.

The Tracks view with content

Recent Tracks is the row of thumbnails just below the artist image where each thumbnail includes the track name and track length below it. Since we’re covering animations here, we’ll create a scale-up animation, where the image starts invisible (opacity: 0) and a little smaller than it’s natural size (scale(0.7)), then is revealed (opacity: 1 )and scales up to its natural size (transform: none).

.track {
	opacity: 0;
	transform: scale(0.7);
	animation: scale-up 1s ease forwards;
}

@keyframes scale-up {
	to {
		opacity: 1;
		transform: none;
	}
}

The Popular Tracks list and Playlist sit side-by-side below the Recent Tracks, where Popular tracks takes up most of the space. We can slide them up a bit on initial view with another set of keyframes:

.track {
	...
	animation: slide-up 1.5s;
}

@keyframes slide-up {
	from {
		transform: translateY(140px);
	}
}

To make the animation feel more natural, we’ll create a stagger effect so the Recent Tracks lead a little ahead of the Popular Tracks and Playlist using an incremental animation delay to each item.

@for $i from 1 to 5 {
	&:nth-child(#{$i + 1}) {
		animation-delay: #{$i * 0.05}s;
	}
}

The code above is basically looking for each child element, then adding a 0.05 second delay to each element it finds. So, for example, the first child gets a 0.05 second delay, the second child gets a 0.10 second delay and so on.

Check out how nice and natural this all looks:

Bonus: micro-interactions!

One of the fun things about working with animations is thinking through the small details because they’re what tie things together and add delight to the user experience. We call these micro-interactions and they serve a good purpose by providing visual feedback when an action is performed.

Depending on the complexity of the animations, we might need a library like anime.js or GSAP. This example is pretty straightforward, so we can accomplish everything we need by writing some CSS.

First micro-interaction: The volume icon

Let’s first get a volume icon in SVG format (Noun Project and Material Design are good sources). On click, we’ll animate-in and out its path element to show the level of volume. For this, we’ll create a method which switches its CSS class according to the volume level.

<svg @click="changeVolume">
	<g :class="`level-${volumeLevel}`">
		<path d="..."/> <!-- volume level 1 -->
		<path d="..."/> <!-- volume level 2 -->
		<path d="..."/> <!-- volume level 3 -->
		<polygon points="..."/>
	</g>
</svg>

Based on this class, we can show and hide certain path elements as:

path {
	opacity: 0;
	transform-origin: left;
	transform: translateX(-5px) scale(0.6);
	transition: transform 0.25s, opacity 0.2s;
}

.level-1 path:first-child,
.level-2 path:first-child,
.level-2 path:nth-child(2),
.level-3 path {
	opacity: 1;
	transform: none;
}
The animated volume control

Second micro-interaction: The favorite icon

Do you like it when you click on Twitter’s heart button? That’s because it feels unique and special by the way it animates on click. We’ll make something similar but real quick. For this, we first get an SVG heart icon and add it to the the markup. Then we’ll add a bouncy animation to it that’s triggered on click.

@keyframes bounce {
	0%, 100% {
		transform: none;
	}
	30% {
		transform: scale(1.3);
	}
	60% {
		transform: scale(0.9);
	}
}

Another fun thing we can do is add other small heart icons around it with random sizes and positions. Ideally, we’d add a few absolute-positioned HTML elements that a heart as the background. Let’s Arrange each of them as below by setting their left and bottom values.

We’ll also include a fade away effect so the icons appear to dissolve as they move upward by adding a keyframe animation on the same click event.

@keyframes float-upwards {
	0%, 100% {
		opacity: 0;
	}
	50% {
		opacity: 0.7;
	}
	50%, 100% {
		transform: translate(-1px, -5px);
	}
}
The animated favorite button

Summing up

That’s all! I hope you find all this motivating to try animations on your own websites and projects.

While writing this, I also wanted to expand on the fundamental animation principles we glossed over earlier because I believe that they help choose animation durations, and avoid non-meaningful animations. That’s important to discuss because doing animations correctly is better than doing them at all. But this sounds like a whole another topic to be covered in a future article.

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