5 Fab, Fresh & Free Animation Libraries

The use of Web animation has been a popular topic among digital designers for several years and for good reason - users make decisions in milliseconds about a website, so any flaw in an "animated" experience is going to result in a host of problems.

What are you doing to ensure smoothness and consistency in your website design?

 

Fortunately, there are several ways to capture the attention of users, and designers can play an important role in their acquisition (also read, "3 Examples of Wild Web Creativity").

These following five animation libraries are some of the most utilized by digital natives across the 'Net. Looking for more or got a suggestion? Read "The First Law of Website Motion" or share your favorite tools and techniques for animation the digital experience with a comment below.

 


Animate CSS: Easily one of the most popular web animation solutions is that of Animate.css, an open source library and a really simple way to add custom CSS3 animations, from bouncing entrances to fading exits, onto a webpage.

Anime.js: Design aesthetic animations with logos, buttons, images, you name it. This supports all the typical user triggers like clicks/hovers/swipes and you have access to a bunch of custom-built animations.

Mo.js: Designed primarily for motion graphics instead of actual UI/UX animations, the  JavaScript library has a lot of amazing features and it really simplifies the animation process whether you're animating a navbar, a logo, or some other complex object.

The GSAP library: Runs purely on JavaScript and it's one of the more robust animation libraries available for developers. This " silky smooth" HTML5 javascript animation tweening engine works on top of HTML5 specs and with all modern browsers.  Perfect for producing SVGs, canvas elements, or jQuery objects.

Wicked CSSone of the newer libraries with a focus on pure CSS code. Wicked CSS works on top of CSS3 properties to offer some excellent effects including object rotations, flips, slide-ins, and so many similar animation effects.