Smooth Scrolling Image Effects

A small set of ideas on animating images and other elements while smooth scrolling a page.

Picking up on our last tutorial on how to add smooth scrolling plus image animations to a page, we’d like to explore some more ideas for animations. We’ve made a small set of effects that show how you can apply some interesting transforms to elements like images and text while scrolling the page smoothly.

Inspirations for some of the effects come from Jesper Landberg’s smooth scroll with skew effect demo, Manuel Rovira’s Dribbble shot Lusaxweb Home and Jo Mor’s website.

The animations are powered by TweenMax.

Attention: Note that the demos are experimental and that we use modern CSS properties that might not be supported in older browsers.

For the demos, we’ve created different (grid) layouts with images that have decorative elements and captions.

We’ve used background images that are wrapped in a division with its overflow set to hidden, so that we can animate the scale or translate of the inner images in some examples. There are many possibilities to explore, for example, rotating the images:

SmoothScrollingEffects_01

…or adding a blend mode to one of the moving elements:

SmoothScrollingEffects_02

As you can also see in Jesper Landberg’s smooth scroll with skew effect demo, you can use the acceleration to control the transform amount. So when you scroll faster, the elements distort more.

Here’s a little GIF to show a detail of one of the animations:

smoothscrolleffect.2019-07-23 11_04_22

Tiny break: 📬 Want to stay up to date with frontend and trends in web design? Subscribe and get our Collective newsletter twice a tweek.

Note that when using the scale transform, the animations in Firefox don’t perform so smoothly.

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

References and Credits

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.

Stay in the loop: Get your dose of frontend twice a week

Fresh news, inspo, code demos, and UI animations—zero fluff, all quality. Make your Mondays and Thursdays creative!