How Animators Helped Web Design
As generations changed, we can see that web design grew at a rapidly fast pace. The elements within the design began to change as well. While visual elements around us are constantly evolving, we also adopt the changes. However, animations are accents that apply a layer to their usability.
What is Animation?
Before knowing why and how-to, let's understand "Animation." Animations, according to customfitonline.com, refer to anything that moves or transitions once the site or app has loaded. The function can be used in three ways;
· Adding visual interest (image or webpage slides in or out of the screen)
· Act as a response (hovering the cursor over sectors and something happens)
· Act as a notification (icon expand or bounce to the screen).
A new layer of information
With understanding the visual aid and the concept of animation. Let us get to how animation has helped with web designing. The most attractive factors in a dull and text-only web page would be graphics and animation hence why animation is most important among other elements in web designing. Animating aspects of an interface have two primary purposes, functional and aesthetic. When the animation is applied correctly, the interface can be easier to use by providing context. An example would be when I tap a menu icon that "slides" the screen to the left, I can slide the screen in the opposite direction when tapping "back." This proves a functional expectation showing the web is screen reliably.
Over time animation has become very powerful because it creates an "illusion of life." This means taking physical things like gravity, reaction, squash, stretch, and timing.
A history of the animation from the past
In the early 2000s, animation was used in website development that was extremely popular due to Flash, a third-party extension installed for the browser. Flash allows designers to create a website that they never experience from the only text. Images could rotate, fly in and out. Icons could flip, grow and shrink. Websites conveyed the "wow" with many explosive effects. And since it was a free extension, every user could gain accessibility. However, with great power comes great responsibility, and the web designer was consumed and overwhelmed with possibilities. This resulted in websites devolving into style over substance.
Flash became a joke in web development and with its animation in general. Flash is generally not used today except for web games and video players.
Animation has come a long way, and we now have a range of software to create websites and animation—for example, Adobe Animate, Vyond, Animaker, etc.
Knowing the history of animation and its meaning, let's look deeper into how animations are used. Animations can provide causality, feedback, relationships, progression, and transition with a proper application.
Causality — When one thing happens just before another, our brains infer that the two things are related and that the first caused the second. For instance, when you click a submit button and the form disappears, you infer that you've pushed the form to react, not that it was on a timer that coincidentally was set to disappear simultaneously clicked the button.
Feedback — When causality is inferred between two events without user input, feedback becomes a response to the action the user has triggered. Notifying the user that the button has been pressed and not press it again. Think about what happens if people press the payment button over and over again…
Relationships — Animation is hierarchically and spatially to one another and which things are possible to you, tying together where you've been, where you are, and what you can do.
Progression — Along with relationships, animation can show the passage through a linear sequence. Imagine the classic "loading bar" and indicate the bar onto a map application, showing your progress along the road.
Transition — Transitions are invaluable for indicating mindset, setting, or task changes. Most people have been trained from television and movies that the things following a transition are tangentially related to the preceded things.
Some examples use animation.
In the past ten years, we have been watching many websites that use animation in two ways, as subtle, non-essential aesthetic flourishes or as direct, basic animation for demonstrating the features of a product or service. Here are some example websites;
Apple.com — The website navigation allows users to click one of the options in the menu and watch tiny versions of the produces slide in at different rates.
Human — The design services firm Human plays a little with the standard convention that clicking a logo will take the visitor "home" by making it explicit.
Webflow — By scrolling down the marketing home page, a lovely drag-and-drop website building app, you'll see screenshots zoom in and fade in. It makes the page load faster: when the images are lazy-loaded, the webserver doesn't fetch them until they scroll into view.
How is animation used in web design?
Aside from this advantage, here are some other reasons for using animation;
· Attracts attention to your website;
· Acts guidance to viewer,
· Keeps visitors engaged and stay for alone time,
· Increase user interactions,
· Creates an emotional connection with visitors,
· Improve the overall website experience.
What was used?
Animator uses certain document types to place animation into websites. There are some that most animator uses;
- Gif — Although CSS animations are replacing them, GIFs are still awesome because they are sharable and have a nicely compartmentalized workflow.
2. JavaScript — Stripe's website is hand-coded by @bdc purely in HTML and CSS with a bit of Javascript to push things along.
3. Video — Reaching the level of performance art, animations that sync complex rendered videos and HTML elements are probably better left up to teams of specialists. Still, there are things to be gleaned from these high-production pieces.
Pros and Cons of web Animation
Let's go through the pros and cons of animation techniques, including legacy solutions no longer in use.
Points animator are aware of
With a lot of animation applied to the website, the performance is worrying about, especially on an underpowered device with high displays. When the processors do not have the power to redraw the screen fast enough to cache the unprocessed chunks, it will destroy the illusion's preciousness. Here are two options to limited to,
1. Optimize the animations. Animators notice the heavy burden of the additional animation scripts and inputs. They provide "light-weighted" animated functions to support the website and allow the web to load faster to improve the loading time with each transition.
2. Offer an alternative. No matter how optimized the website is, there is still a browser that combines poor animation support to make it unusable. The animator would provide additional add-ons or extension packs to ensure the website works properly.
Want to become a web animator?
Whether you're a web designer or a front-end developer, investing in web animation skills and theory will help you finesse your designs and interfaces. Fortunately, old-school animation has had decades to mature into an art form with educational materials and techniques handed down from the masters.
One of those is storyboarding. You need a bird's-eye view of the many paths an interaction can take on large projects. Disney's animation studio first created storyboards: large, movable corkboards on which animators could pin illustrated scenes to lay out a story's progression along a timeline. The illustrations could be removed and added as the story developed, and the board could be toted to different locations for different teams to work on. For the web, you'll typically want to build non-linear storyboards around the various paths an interaction can take, which can be done by devoting different boards to different sets of actions and reactions. When first creating sketches or wireframes, provision how your elements will be animated. Work and design for the user. Animations can be a powerful tool to help your audience achieve their goals and feel engaged with your content. Using the understanding of human perception, we can avoid the pitfalls of designing animations that, despite their creative application, ultimately distract, confuse, or frustrate our users.
Takeaway on Animation
We can see that animation has proven it's staying power and effectiveness compared to the old web design. Due to its permanence and proficiency, it will continue to grow into the design industry. Like ordinarily design, animation can be very subjective and personal. Therefore, it is essential to think about the people who will interact with the animation.
