When used correctly, animations can significantly improve the user experience. There are many elements on a web page that can be animated to make them come alive. Basic things like the background color of a button or the border radius of certain elements on a web page can also be animated using CSS.
However, CSS has its limitations, and if you want more control over every aspect of your animated elements, you'll need to use JavaScript. In this article, I’ll show you eight of the best free and open source JavaScript animation libraries that you can use in your projects right now.
Mo.js is an excellent library for adding JavaScript-based motion graphics to your website. It's very fast, produces smooth animations, and looks great on a variety of devices. It's also modular, so you avoid extra overhead if you only want to use a specific component.
The library has a declarative API for setting the values of different properties for the components you create. It comes with four different built-in modules called Html, Shape, ShapeSwirl, and Burst. Bursts and swirls can be used creatively in a variety of user interactions with elements on your website.
Try clicking anywhere in the CodePen above and you'll see a nice bunch of circles and stars. It was created by LegoMushroom using the Burst and Shape modules in mo.js.
The documentation formo.js provides many interesting examples like this to help you understand various aspects of the library.
Anime is one of the most popular animation libraries on GitHub. It is very lightweight and comes with an easy-to-learn API. This library can be used to animate CSS properties, SVG and DOM properties.
It gives you a lot of control over how elements animate. You can control the speed, direction and order in which objects move. Whenever you choose to do this, you can choose to pause, restart, or reverse the animation.
The library also provides good support for SVG animations. You can create a smooth transformation effect or create a line drawing animation between two different SVG shapes.
Try clicking the Write Name button in the CodePen above and you will see the letters of my name animate one at a time. This demo is part of a series of tutorials about anime. You can check them out to learn more about the library.
Popmotion is another lightweight and popular animation library. You can use it to animate numbers, colors, and complex strings. The main animation functions in the library are about 5kb, and the entire library is about 12kb.
You can use it to create two kinds of animation: keyframe and spring. You can provide start and end points, etc. for keyframe animations. Spring animations have properties such as stiffness, damping, mass, and speed, giving your animations more natural motion. The library also comes with many utility functions for calculations, such as angle, clamp, distance, snapp, etc.
The keyframe animation in gaougalos's CodePen demo above is an animation made using the Popmotion library.
The ScrollReveal library comes in handy when you want to animate an element as it scrolls in or out of the viewport.
There are many options for animating elements. You can use the delay, duration, and interval properties to control the progress of the animation. There are also options to control the rotation, scaling, and movement of objects to be displayed. The library also comes with callbacks that can be used to determine what happens before or after an element is displayed.
Sava Lazic’s above CodePen demo uses the ScrollReveal library to create a visually appealing vertical timeline. You can create content similar to showcasing products or projects on your website.
Vivus is an amazing JavaScript-based animation library created specifically for making SVG animations. It is very lightweight and has no dependencies.
Vivus gives you three different ways to animate paths in SVG. You can animate all lines at once, with a delay, or one after another. It also gives you a lot of flexibility when timing your animations.
Some things you should remember when using Vivus is that it always animates elements in the order defined in the SVG. Also, the element you want to animate should have a stroke rather than a fill.
The SVG path animation in Alex Nelson’s CodePen demo above was created with just six lines of code and some help from Vivus.
You can guess from the name Typed.js that this animation library is used to enter text. You can pass all the strings you want to input as an array. The library also implements a more SEO-friendly way to read the text you want to animate by typing from the HTML div on the web page.
You can fine-tune the behavior of the typing animation with the help of a series of parameters. This includes typing speed, backspace speed, start delay, backspace delay, loop count, and more. You can also define a bunch of callback functions that fire on different events (such as after typing a string).
Conner’s CodePen above illustrates how we can use this library to make boring 404 error pages interesting.
It's a good idea to add a progress bar to any process that takes some time to complete. This lets the user know how quickly the task is progressing. For example, you can display a progress bar in an online image editor to let users know that the page is not only stuck, but that the image is actually being processed in the background.
The ProgressBar.js library makes it very easy for developers to add stylish progress bars to their websites. In addition to creating a progress bar using some of the built-in shapes, such as lines, circles, or semicircles, you can also choose to use your own custom shapes. This opens up a range of interesting possibilities.
As you can see in the demo above, we can animate various properties in the progress bar. You can check out this introductory ProgressBar.js tutorial to learn more about the library.
Lotie for Airbnb is a different animation library than the others we’ve discussed so far. It parses animations created with Adobe After Effects that have been exported to JSON using Bodymovin. You can then render these effects directly on the web page.
The library's GitHub page explains the installation process and how it works in detail. There are many global methods you can use to control animation progress. You can easily start, stop, and reverse animation direction.
You only need to write a few lines of code to load the required JSON file and initialize the animation with some parameters. The CodePen demo from kittons above is a great example of how to easily render After Effects animations in the browser.
In this article, we examine eight popular free and open source JavaScript animation libraries. They each do something different and target different aspects of web animation. With these libraries, you will be able to animate almost any content on your website. I hope you use these libraries to create a beautiful website that sets you apart from the competition! Just make sure not to overuse animations.
One thing to also keep in mind is that you should still try to use CSS for simple animations. There's not much point in loading a full JavaScript animation library if you just want to change the color of an element when the user hovers over it.
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