Animated navigation effect… without javascript or flash!
I can make a ball bounce up and down in flash, and that’s about it. And my javascript is rapidly improving, but still leaves a lot to be desired, but simple animation effects using flash or javascript can really enhance a design.
For example, one of my favourite site-designs, http://www.futurelab.org.uk/ (I love the classy, formal look, aimed at senior teachers, but also with splashes of colour and animation to suggest innovation and fun), uses flash to create a subtle bouncing navigation effect.
So what’s a boy to do?
A week or so ago Sitepoint published a cute little tutorial on how to make surprising animations react to browser resizing… and the magic of it was that it only used a gif and a jpeg to achieve this. Inspired by this, I decided to make the futurelab navigation using just animated gifs, and the results are pretty good I reckon. And it only needs a couple of 1 pixel wide gifs per navigation item – less than 1kb in total. (I also only learned how to make animated gifs in photoshop this afternoon, using this tutorial).
A note of caution: my navigation items are all the same colour, so you’d think I could use the same gifs for each item… but not so. Something to do with how firefox renders animated gifs means it doesn’t animate the hover-off image if it’s used on another navigation item too. The solution is simple: make a few copies of the hover-off gif with different names.
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Tags: animation, css, flash, gif, javascript, navigation, simple