Libraries – Pavvy Designs

Hey kids, you ready for me to tell you all about this newfangled thing called Bootstrap? Well get un-ready, ‘cause I’d never do that to you. It’s not that Bootstrap isn’t great, it’s just that if you work in web design, and you’ve been paying any attention at all, you already know about it.

And if you don’t… well… welcome to the industry! We have some articles you may want to check out.

For everyone else, I went searching for the new(ish), the exciting, and perhaps even the fun. God bless GitHub’s advanced search functionality, because I found CSS libraries that do all kinds of stuff. Even if you don’t end up using them, you can absolutely learn from them. Have a look:

CSS Wand

CSS Wand is one of the simpler and smaller libraries on this list; it’s really just a handful of simple, pure CSS-based animations that you can copy-paste into your site, and customize at will. If you need to make your buttons, inputs, or loading animations feel fancy, you could try these out.

Water.css

Yeah, that’s Water.css, as in “just add water”. It’s a set of default styles that, while it falls short of being a full CSS framework, can get you started if you don’t feeling bothering to come up with your own type or form styles. It weighs in at less than 2kb, and uses no classes. That’s my kind of starter framework, to be honest.

Raisin CSS

Raisin CSS describes itself as a utility CSS library, which means (you guessed it) a whole lot of classes. They’ve got pre-built modules for CSS Grid, FlexBox, breakpoints, the Display property, overflow, positioning, and more. I’d personally use a library like this if I was going to be use JS to alter the appearance of a lot of different elements on the fly.

Atomize

Atomize takes things a little further than Raisin CSS, creating something more like a full framework based on Atomic CSS, and the theory of separation of concerns. It aims to be style-neutral, let you define your own breakpoints, and you can use it with NPM, or just download the source for use with any other dev pipeline.

Sassyfication

Sassyfication has a couple of things going for it, starting with its name. It just makes me want to snap my fingers in a “Z” shape, and tell people they just can’t handle me. It also has a collection of commonly-used variables and mixins for SASS. Think of the previously-mentioned utility libraries, but for SASS.

Man, I love SASS, but I still miss LESS. Anybody else miss LESS?

Spectrum CSS

It should be no surprise that Adobe has its own design system, or “design language” as they sometimes call it. Well, it’s called Spectrum, and Spectrum CSS is what you might use to make your site look a lot like an Adobe project. Or, you know, you could just see how they do things, for fun.

Box-shadows.css

Okay… just how much do you love drop-shadows, and the box-shadow property? Probably not as much as the people who made Box-shadows.css, a whole library dedicated to one thing: rounded corners.

I’m kidding. I think you can guess what this does. If you need more shadows in your life and your UI, look no further.

Flix Carousel

Flix Carousel is, as the name suggests, a carousel based on Netflix’s preview carousels. It’s pure CSS, which I love, and seems to work pretty well. The only hiccup is that the preview on the repository page isn’t working. For a visual example, you’ll have to head to the author’s portfolio.

Woah.css

Woah.css is billed as a CSS Animation Library for eccentric web developers, and it lives up to that promise. The animated elements remind me a lot of the old video transitions on TV in the ‘90s, and the video transitions in every “consumer-grade” video editor. It’s cheesy as heck, and a lot of fun to play with.

Animation Library

It’s called “Animation Library”, and the animations are about as sedate as the name. This is not a bad thing, as a corporate site probably doesn’t need or want ‘90s video transitions for their animated buttons. It’s pure CSS, so just add the classes you want, and go from there.

Wipe.css

Wipe.css is basically a brand new CSS reset, based on libraries like sanitize.css and normalize.css. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, nor should it. It has sensible defaults that make a lot of sense to me, and I might well be using it myself in the near-ish future.

Denali CSS Library

Denali CSS Library is another one based on a design system, specifically the (you guessed it) Denali design system. It features a sleek, modern, and highly sans-serif sort of look that’s perfect for business sites. It’s also got some fairly detailed documentation to get you started.

nova-skeletons

nova-skeletons is an interesting one in that it should definitely never be used for production. It’s basically used to create grey blocks for dummy content in prototypes, as seen in this screenshot. Now dummy content is never completely ideal, but for very early prototypes, this might actually be better than Lorem Ipsum.

vov.css

vov.css is a lovely set of pure CSS animations that covers basically every (basic) animation you might want. Just add a class and go. One thing I do like is that they include an extra set of classes for adding delay to the animation.

relaxCSS

relaxCSS is a full (but small) framework that styles most of the things you might want in a basic web page or app, with extra components for navigation, tags, and things like that. It also features a dark theme. What I like most is that there’s no layout framework, so you can just add these styles into a site with a Grid or Flexbox layout and get on with your day.

Featured image via DepositPhotos.

There are an awful lot of libraries that want to help you animate things on the web. These aren’t really libraries that help you with the syntax or the technology of animations, but rather are grab-and-use as-is libraries. Want to apply a class like “animate-flip-up” and watch an element, uhhh, flip up? These are the kind of libraries to look at.

I wholeheartedly think you should both 1) learn how to animate things in CSS by learning the syntax yourself and 2) customize animations to tailor the feel to your site. Still, poking around libraries like this helps foster ideas, gets you started with code examples, and might form a foundation for your own projects.

Let’s take a look at the landscape of them. Some libraries have different approaches: only take what you need classes, Sass mixins, light JavaScript libraries for adding/removing classes, etc. But they are all essentially “CSS animation libraries.” (Some of them are kinda funny having “CSS3” in the title, which kinda dates them. People just don’t say that anymore.)

While animations can both be fun and create useful interactions, it’s worth remembering that not all users want them when browsing the web. See Eric Bailey’s “Revisiting prefers-reduced-motion, the reduced motion media query” for information on how to accommodate users who prefer little or no motion.

Animista

You pick an animation you like and it gives you a class name you can use that calls a keyframe animation (you copy and paste both). The point is you just take what you need.

See the Pen

Animista Example by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)

on CodePen.

Animate.css

One of the big original classic CSS animation libraries from Dan Eden.

See the Pen

Animate.css (Part 3) by Hudson Taylor (@Hudson_Taylor11)

on CodePen.

tachyons-animate

Tachyons itself is an atomic CSS library with a ton of utility classes for essentially designing anything by adding classes to what you need. tachyons-animate extends those by adding “Single purpose classes to help you orchestrate CSS animations.” It can be used alone, but even the docs suggest it can be used in combination with other animation libraries since helper classes are generically useful.

See the Pen

tachyons-animate by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)

on CodePen.

Infinite

These animations, like rotations and pulses, that are specifically designed to run and repeat forever.

See the Pen

BgrYZo by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)

on CodePen.

Motion UI

A Sass library for creating flexible CSS transitions and animations.

See the Pen

Motion UI by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)

on CodePen.

micron

a [μ] microInteraction library built with CSS Animations and controlled by JavaScript Power

See the Pen

Micron by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)

on CodePen.

Vivify

Vivify is sort of like Animate.css in the sense that it contains a lot of the same types of animations. It does offer plenty of its own as well.

See the Pen

Vivify by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)

on CodePen.

Hover.css

A collection of CSS3 powered hover effects to be applied to links, buttons, logos, SVG, featured images and so on. Easily apply to your own elements, modify or just use for inspiration. Available in CSS, Sass, and LESS.