7 Useful and Awesome Parallax Tools For Effects You Should Try
Parallax is a site technique that pretty much borrows the math concept of the same name. In math, Parallax is that effect where objects in the distance move at different speeds depending on their distance from their observer. This is best noticed when you are traveling in your car or going by train or any vehicle at some speed. We have collected 7 most useful and important Parallax Tools for giving zooming effects in the image.
The trees that line the road will be speeding to your back at pretty much the same pace that you are driving. However, the rocky mountains that are a little further from the road will pass you at a much slower pace. The clouds at a really far distance will only seem to move very little at a time. This in essence is the parallax effect. Being able to replicate this effect on websites makes them look grand. If your site has many graphical items and they are all built on multiple layers, you must use the parallax effect for an awesomely cool site.
Parallax Tools For Effects
If something is amazing, then it is understood that achieving and obtaining that effect is going to be tricky. Luckily the internet attracts some of the brightest minds in the world towards and some genius website designers and developers have come up with some tools that will allow you to implement these effects in your site design easily. This way, you can focus on your design and not lose sleep over implementing a particular parallax effect.
Scrollorama:
Of all the techniques that we discuss in this post, this is by far the quickest way to deploy a Parallax solution in your site. The developer describes it as a simple JavaScript that can be used to give life to page elements based on the relative position of the scroll bar. To add, the speed of implementation may limit how much you can push the visual appeal of Parallax.
curtain.js:
One of the top plugin that allows for some pretty impressive effects is curtain.js. It gets its name because of the way it showcases the content just like a curtain would raise at a theater to show the performers. It is a simple effect if you are into creating sites that have something incredible to show case, this is the tool for you.
jQuery-Parallax:
Furthering the concept of elements moving based on the position of the cursor i.e. the mouse position is jQuery-Parallax. The idea is that there are many layers on which your site is built. As the cursor is moved, the every layer, with all of its elements will start moving at speeds that are designated by you. This is a variant of the Parallax effect in that instead of individual elements, entire layers will move.
stellar.js:
A jQuery plugin that provides an immediately recognizable Parallax effect is stellar.js. While the above mentioned Scrollorama is still the most easy to use technique, this technique comes a close second. The usage is pretty straight forward. All you have to do is add some basic data attributes in the markup and you are good to go. The plugin also gives you the ability to align background layers as well as elements just the way you want.
jparallax:
If your website has a very high focus on interactivity with elements reacting to what is done with the mouse cursor, then you should definitely give jparallax a try. At its core, the objective of this plugin is to allow the various nodes that are used in the website to transform into layers that are positioned in an absolute fashion. The rate at which they move is decided by the dimensions of the layers involved.
Skrollr:
Among other Parallax Tools Skrollr is the best tool. The Skrollr is something which impressed us a lot during our evaluation of various parallax effect plugins. It boasts of primarily two types of effects and they are so effective and seem like a natural fit for sites that want to be colorful and fun.
The first effect is the transform effect that allows you to transform elements by way of scaling, skewing and rotating. Further each of these transformations can be applied on all dimensions – height, width and padding. This extends to font sizes and z-index as well, which is just amazing.
Parallax.js:
The last technique that we are discussing is the Parallax.js JavaScript framework. This is a simple and extremely basic implementation of its namesake website design effect. It allows you include slide transitions in the design and allows background transitions too. It is an extremely light weight code and hence the transitions work beautifully and are incredibly snappy.
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These plugins look great, but there are no links to examples or downloads for any of them.