I’m finding myself say “I can just make that myself” more and more often when I’m taking inspiration and hacking websites together.

Animations kept me away for some time because I always felt they were more complicated than I wanted to deal with. But recently that’s changing, mostly because I don’t want to deal with this:

An excerpt from a 63 page JS file, size 12 font

Websites I’m finding have a lot of JavaScript, too much for my low patience to go through. So, I’ve been making the animations on my own.

It all started with some falling leaves:

Learning that super simple TweenMax tweens and a lot of playing around. Slowly I started understanding how the tween settings worked.

Next came when I was working on my newest project, my Online Library. I wanted to copy the side menu slide-out I found online. Instead of dealing with that site’s minified and messy JS, just making my own.

I found this great gallery animation from www.andrgavr.com and after trying to hack it together with the menu slide out animation, my head went “I can just make that”.

And I did.

This one still needs some fine tuning, but I’m loving my newfound animation confidence.

Next I’m going to try recreating this gif in After Effects and using Lottie to get it into my Online Library project

Post to come about my Online Library soon, just got to get these animations done :)