Inspiration for Search UI Effects

A couple of schematic, inspirational proof-of-concepts for how to show the search interface on a website using CSS animations.

By in Playground on
Demo Code

Today we’d like to share a couple of ideas for search interaction effects with you. Mainly, we’d like to provide you with some inspiration for how to show the search interface in an interesting way. Maybe you’ve seen some modern animations for showing the search already, like Swiss Army Man or CMMNTY. Today we want to explore some different layouts combined with some engaging CSS animations.

Attention: The demos serve only as proof-of-concepts and inspirational ideas for UI interactions. Made with modern CSS properties; for fierce browsers only.

The demos all have a schematic look and almost all of them show the search interface when clicking on the search icon that is always placed in the top right corner of the page (except for demo 2 where the search UI alters with an animation once the input is focused).

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Example Search UI Effects

Have a look at some of the final states of the opened search UIs:

SearchUIEffects_01

SearchUIEffects_02

SearchUIEffects_03

SearchUIEffects_04

SearchUIEffects_05

We hope you enjoy this little set and find it inspirational!

More Inspiration

Check out some more component inspiration:

Manoela Ilic

Manoela is the main tinkerer at Codrops. With a background in coding and passion for all things design, she creates web experiments and keeps frontend professionals informed about the latest trends.

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  7. Good job! But the main problem is that user must click on button X or press ESC to close search box. So, demo looks good but not much user friendly 🙁

    • Why is this a problem exactly? It allows the user to focus clearly on the search form (that they’ve asked for) and then take control over their next step.

    • Just a demo for inspirational uses. If you want to change some specifics, feel free to do it on your own 😛

  9. Nice job! I’am surprised that you used CSS animations instead of anime-js this time.

  11. Inspirational is the key word …Thanks for inspiring me as I’m working on a search interaction project as well.As always very beautiful layouts,interactions and concepts thank you for sharing.

  12. Nice demo! Good to see there still is improvement in even the most common parts of a webpage 🙂

  13. No 10 is very neat. A surprising effect, which gives a nice visual metaphor what searching is about.

  15. It’s really cool demo . I am already using it what a great effect with advance UI. Thank you so much a lot

  16. These look amazing! Great job. One thing you could do to improve them is raise up the search to the top of the screen instead of the middle. The reason why I say that is that when you click the search, the keyboard on my Android pops up and covers the cool looking suggestions section. Then you have to click out of the search to get the keyboard to go away to see the suggestions which kind of defeats the purpose. But they look amazing!

  18. I love these, but I’m scared about incompatible browsers. Does anyone know what browsers these may work for? I’d like to implement something like this, but have graceful degradation. Thank you!

  20. I know you said this is for fierce browsers only, but can you elaborate on the browser supports?

    I see the examples given, and I think most will run on the current version of modern browsers (or several versions below current one)

  21. Thank you for sharing search UI inspiration effects for wire framing. I am always doing wire framing for all the projects that are assigned to me.

  22. Hi Mary, Thanks so much. I really appreciate you taking the time to create such a wonderful resource for us!

  26. It’s all depends on the use case. If the end user searches some phrase or queries that already available in the current web page then you should use a simple input. A couple of schematic, inspirational proof-of-concepts for how to show the search interface on a website using CSS animations. I personally feel that no 2 is a great inspiration, While they are all neat transitions.