CSS Transforms

With CSS3 came new ways to position and alter elements. Now general layout techniques can be revisited with alternative ways to size, position, and change elements. All of these new techniques are made possible by the transform property.

The transform property comes in two different settings, two-dimensional and three-dimensional. Each of these come with their own individual properties and values.

Within this lesson we’ll take a look at both two-dimensional and three-dimensional transforms. Generally speaking, browser support for the transform property isn’t great, but it is getting better every day. For the best support vendor prefixes are encouraged, however you may need to download the nightly version of Chrome to see all of these transforms in action.

Transitions & Animations

The transition-property property determines exactly what properties will be altered in conjunction with the other transitional properties. By default, all of the properties within an element’s different states will be altered upon change. However, only the properties identified within the transition-property value will be affected by any transitions.

In the example above, the background property is identified in the transition-property value. Here the background property is the only property that will change over the duration of 1 second in a linear fashion. Any other properties included when changing an element’s state, but not included within the transition-property value, will not receive the transition behaviors as set by the transition-duration or transition-timing-function properties.

If multiple properties need to be transitioned they may be comma separated within the transition-property value. Additionally, the keyword value all may be used to transition all properties of an element.

8 SIMPLE CSS3 TRANSITIONS THAT WILL WOW YOUR USERS

CSS3 has introduced countless possibilities for UX designers, and the best thing about them is that the coolest parts are really simple to implement.

Just a couple of lines of code will give you an awesome transition effect that will excite your users, increase engagement and ultimately, when used well, increase your conversions. What’s more, these effects are hardware accelerated, and a progressive enhancement that you can use right now.

Here are 8 really simple effects that will add life to your UI and smiles to your users’ faces.

All of these effects (bar one) are controlled with the transition property. So we can see these effects working, we’ll set up a div in an HTML page.