A Complete CSS Animation Tutorial For Beginners

Before starting CSS Animation, let's understand what CSS is. CSS specifies how elements appear on screen, paper, speech, and other media. It is used by most browsers and lets you control fonts, colors, layout, etc. A web page's appearance and layout are specified using the CSS language. 

The goal of Cascading Style Sheets is to provide a consistent look for all web documents so that designers can keep their site design the same for each browser used by their audience. You can create rule sets applied across entire pages or parts with CSS. This makes it easy to apply changes to the website and quickly make small changes where needed.

What is CSS Animation, and why do we use it? 

Animation is an excellent way to liven up your website. Whether it's improving a button, killing time while a page loads, or adding a splash of colour to a landing page, animation can help to keep viewers' attention and delight them. 

There are several methods for adding animated graphics to a web page. With just a bit of HTML and CSS know-how, you'll be able to animate objects on the web page, such as loading bars or underlines. Without learning JavaScript, you can easily add visual flair to your website with CSS animations.

It is very simple to specify the browser which supports CSS Transitions as all the versions of all browsers support all the sub-properties. Some values that begin with the keyword "jump" cannot be used in Internet Explorer. You can use "start" and "end" instead. The different animation sub-properties have similar browser support among browsers. You can use LambdaTest to perform cross browser compatibility testing of CSS-animated websites and web apps. Using LambdaTest you can perform web testing on 3000+ browsers and OS combinations for cross browser compatibility issues and check that your webpage fallbacks are functioning correcly on browsers that don't support CSS Animation.

My Favorite CSS Animation Examples

These animations are an excellent resource for designers and developers. They range from immediate interaction effects to literary works of art. Please feel free to use them as inspiration for your projects.

How to Create a CSS Hover Transition Effect

This lighthearted animation shows how to trigger a text highlight effect in response to a mouseover action.

The new and improved loading spinner

We're all familiar with load-spinning icons. This is one such way to create your own. While it's not quite as universal as the CSS animation method, it remains relatively easy to implement, scalable and uses SVG to achieve a similar effect.

Scrolling Text Animation

Create a text loop with this code snippet. It works by rotating words into and out of view, creating an animated effect that looks like a slot machine.

Loading Screens

CSS animations can do more than make simple transitions. A loading effect can be created using the scale property.

Minimal Cat

This is an excellent example of leveraging negative space combined with CSS animations. It's a simple design, but so much personality and character are conveyed through shape and movement.

Conclusion

CSS animations are used to bring life and personality to an otherwise static web page. They are fun to use and implement on a browser. Learning about CSS animation is a complex task. It would be best to allow your imagination to run wild and see what works and doesn't. Then, as you gain more skills and experience, you will eventually bring more vigor and interactivity into your web tools and effectively use dynamic design to enhance users' browsing experience.