Animation is one of the great ways to attract your customers' attention.
In project development, we can add visual sense and user experience to our projects by creating interesting animations. At the same time, we also add a unique aesthetic to our website, but also increase user engagement and create memorable first impression.
Therefore, in today’s article, I will compile 10 interesting and useful JavaScript animation libraries to help you quickly create animations, including scroll animation, handwriting animation, SPA page transition, typing animation, color animation, SVG animation… …their functionality is practical and simple.
So, let's get started now.
1.Anime.js
Address: https://animejs.com/
With over 43,000 stars on GitHub, Anime.js is one of the most popular animation libraries.
It is a lightweight JavaScript animation library with a simple API that can be used to animate CSS properties, SVG, DOM properties, and JavaScript objects.
Using Anime.js we can play, pause, restart or reverse animations. The library also provides amazing functionality to animate multiple elements with following and overlapping operations. The library also contains various animation-related events that we can listen to using callbacks and promises.
2.Lottie
Address: https://airbnb.io/lottie/
Lottie is a library that parses Adobe After Effects animations exported in JSON format using the Bodymovin plug-in and renders them natively on mobile and web applications.
This eliminates the need for users to manually recreate advanced animations created in After Effects by professional designers. The web version alone has over 27,000 stars on GitHub.
3. Velocity
Address: http://velocityjs.org/
Using Velocity, you can create color animations, transforms, loops, easings, SVG animations, and more. It uses the same $.animate() API as the method in the jQuery library, and can be integrated with jQuery when available.
This library provides gradient, scrolling and sliding effects. In addition to being able to control the animation's duration and delay, we can also reverse the animation at some point after it's completed, or stop the animation entirely while it's in progress.
This library has over 17k stars on GitHub and is an ideal alternative to Anime.js.
4.Rough Notation
Address: https://roughnotation.com/
Rough Notation is a JavaScript library for creating and animating colorful annotations on web pages. It uses RoughJS to create a hand-drawn look and feel.
We can create multiple annotation styles, including underline, box, circle, highlight, strikethrough, etc., and control the duration and color of each annotation style.
5.Popmotion
Address: https://popmotion.io/
Popmotion is a powerful library for creating eye-catching animations. Why is it different? — Popmotion does not assume the properties of the object you want to animate, but instead provides simple, composable functions that can be used in any JavaScript environment.
The library supports keyframe, spring and inertial animation of numbers, colors and complex strings. The library is well tested and actively maintained, with over 19,000 stars on GitHub.
6. Live
Address: https://maxwellito.github.io/vivus/
Vivus is a JavaScript library that allows you to animate SVGs so that they appear to be drawn. It's fast, lightweight, completely tool-independent, and offers three different SVG animation methods: It offers three different SVG animation methods: delayed, synchronized, and one-to-one.
We can also use custom scripts to draw your SVG the way you like.
Vivus also allows you to customize duration, delay, timing functions, and other animation settings.
Check out Vivus Instant for live, hands-on examples.
7.GSAP：Green Stocking Animation Platform
Address: https://greensock.com/
GreenSock Animation Platform (GSAP) is a library that allows us to create stunning animations that work in all major browsers. You can use it in React, Vue, WebGL, and HTML canvas to animate colors, strings, motion paths, and more.
It also comes with the ScrollTrigger plug-in, which allows you to create impressive scroll-based animations with just a few lines of code.
GSAP is a versatile and popular tool used on over 11 million websites and has over 15K stars on GitHub. You can use GreenSock's GSDevTools to easily debug animations created using GSAP.
8. Three.js
Address: https://trijs.org/
Three.js is a lightweight library for displaying complex 3D objects and animations. It leverages WebGL, SVG, and CSS3D renderers to create engaging 3D experiences that run on a variety of browsers and devices. It is a well-known library in the JavaScript community, with over 85k stars on GitHub.
9.ScrollReveal
Address: https://scrollrevealjs.org/
The ScrollReveal library allows you to easily animate DOM elements entering or leaving the browser viewport. It provides various types of elegant effects to show or hide elements while scrolling in multiple browsers. The ScrollReveal library is also very easy to use, has zero dependencies on GitHub, and has over 2100 starred users.
10. Barb.js
Address: https://barba.js.org/
One creative way to make your website stand out is to add vivid transitions between web pages as users browse. This results in a better user experience than simply displaying a new web page or reloading the browser.
That's why Barba.js is so useful; the library lets websites run like single-page applications (SPA), creating delightful page transitions.
It reduces latency between pages and minimizes the number of HTTP requests made by the browser. It has nearly 11,000 stars on GitHub.
11.Mon.js
Address: https://mojs.github.io/
It provides a simple, declarative API that makes it easy to create smooth animations and special effects that look great on all screen sizes.
You can move HTML or SVG DOM elements, or create special Mo.js objects with a unique set of capabilities.
It is a reliable and well-tested library with over 1500 tests written and has over 1700 stars on GitHub.
12.Typed.js
Address: https://mattboldt.com/demos/typed-js/
Its name says it all: an animated typing library.
It can enter a specific string character by character as if someone were typing in real time, allowing you to pause your typing speed or even pause typing for a specific amount of time.
Use the smart backspace key, which allows you to type consecutive strings starting with the same character set as the current character, without having to backspace the entire previous string - like we saw in the demo above.
Additionally, it supports batch input, which is typing a set of characters on the screen at the same time instead of typing them one after another. Typed.js has over 12K stars on GitHub and is trusted by Slack and Envato.
Summarize
As a developer, leveraging these tools will undoubtedly enhance your projects and make them stand out in an increasingly competitive digital environment.