lax.js

Simple & light weight (<2kb gzipped) vanilla javascript plugin to create smooth & beautiful animations when you scrolllll! Harness the power of the most intuitive interaction and make your websites come alive!

>>> DEMO <<<

Getting started

NPM setup

npm install lax.js

import lax from 'lax.js'

Basic browser setup

1. Add lax.js to your html

<script src="lib/lax.min.js" >

2. Initialize the plugin

window.onload = function() {
	lax.setup() // init
	  
	document.addEventListener('scroll', function(e) {
	  lax.update(window.scrollY) // update every scroll
	}, false)
}

3. Add attributes to the HTML tags you want to animate e.g.

<p data-lax-preset="spin fadeInOut">Look at me goooooo!</p>

4. Scroll and enjoy!

Usage with React, Vue.js & DOM changes

Indexing the list of elements to animate when loading the page could increase the performance of lax.js. Using React or vue.js is likely to add elements after the initial window.onload. When adding components to animte the DOM, calling lax.addElement(domElement) is needed.

See below for working examples:

• react
• vue

You can also call lax.removeElement(domElement) when the component unmounts.

Presets

The easiest way to get started is to use the presets via the data-lax-preset attribute. You can chain multiple presets together for e.g. data-lax-preset="blurOut fadeOut spin". Some presets also support an optional strength e.g. data-lax-preset="blurOut-50"

See the list of Supported Presets for details.

Custom Animations

You can easily create your own effects. Just add an attribute to your HTML tag (see Supported Attribute Keys) with an array of values. These arrays take the format of scrollPos val, scrollPos val, ... e.g:

<p data-lax-opacity="0 1, 100 1, 200 0">
	I start to fade out after the window scrolls 100px
	and then I'm gone by 200px!
</p>

By default the scrollPos is window.scrollY but you can use an element distance from the top of the screen instead. You can either pass in a selector data-lax-anchor="#bio" or set it to use itself data-lax-anchor="self" (this is the default for all presets) e.g.

<p data-lax-opacity="200 1, 100 1, 0 0" data-lax-anchor="self">
	I start to fade out after I'm 100px away from the top of the window
	and then I'm gone by the time I reach the top!
</p>

There are also some shortcuts for useful values:

Key	Value
vw	window.innerWidth
vh	window.innerHeight
elw	targetElement.clientWidth
elh	targetElement.clientHeight

You can use these instead of integer values for the scrollPos e.g.

<p data-lax-opacity="0 1, vh 0">
	I fade out as the page scrolls down and
	I'm gone when the page has scrolled the view port height!
</p>

You can also use vanilla JS within ( ) for calculations and access to more variables e.g.

<p data-lax-opacity="0 1, (document.body.scrollHeight*0.5) 0">
	I fade out as the page scrolls down and
	I'm gone when the page has scrolled 50%
	down the entire page height!
</p>

Supported Presets

Preset	Default Strength
linger	n/a
lazy	100
eager	100
lazy	100
slalom	50
crazy	n/a
spin	360
spinRev	360
spinIn	360
spinOut	360
blurInOut	40
blurIn	40
blurOut	40
fadeInOut	n/a
fadeIn	n/a
fadeOut	n/a
driftLeft	100
driftRight	100
leftToRight	1
rightToLeft	1
zoomInOut	0.2
zoomIn	0.2
zoomOut	0.2
swing	30
speedy	30

Supported Attribute Keys

Transforms

Transform	Key
opacity	data-lax-opacity
translate	data-lax-translate
translateX	data-lax-translate-x
translateY	data-lax-translate-y
scale	data-lax-scale
scaleX	data-lax-scale-x
scaleY	data-lax-scale-y
skew	data-lax-skew
skewX	data-lax-skew-x
skewY	data-lax-skew-y
rotate	data-lax-rotate

Filters (note - these may be unperformant on low powered machines)

Filter	Key
brightness	data-lax-brightness
contrast	data-lax-contrast
hue-rotate	data-lax-hue-rotate
blur	data-lax-blur
invert	data-lax-invert
saturate	data-lax-saturate
grayscale	data-lax-grayscale

Other

Filter	Key
background position	data-lax-bg-pos
background position-x	data-lax-bg-pos-x
background position-y	data-lax-bg-pos-y

Custom Presets

To avoid duplicate code you can define your own presets with a list of attributes e.g.

lax.addPreset("myCoolPreset", function() {
	return { 
		"data-lax-opacity": "(-vh*0.8) 40, (-vh*0.6) 0",
		"data-lax-rotate": "(-vh*2) 1000, (-vh*0.5) 0" 
	}
})

You can then access this preset like this:

<p data-lax-preset="myCoolPreset">
	I'm the coolest preset in the world 😎
</p>

Performance Tips

• Avoid nesting lax enabled elements within each other, you'll get better performance using lax with smaller elements in the dom tree.
• Avoid transforms on large elements, e.g. full screen backgrounds.
• By default elements that have opacity 0 aren't updated. You can either manually set up a data-lax-opacity to control this yourself or use data-lax-optimize which will set the elements opacity to 0 when it goes off -screen.
• By default -webkit-backface-visibility: hidden; is added to your elements style to encourage the browser to render that object as a layer on the GPU and increase performance. To turn this off add data-lax-use-gpu="false" to your element.

Notes

Screen rotating & resizing

As some values (vh, vw, elh, elw) are calculated on load, when the screen size changes or rotates you might want to recalculate these. E.g.

window.addEventListener("resize", function() {
	lax.populateElements()
});

Be warned, on mobile, a resize event is fired when you scroll and the toolbar is hidden so you might want to check if the width or orientation has changed.

Scroll Wheels

Scroll wheels only increment the scroll position in steps which can cause the animations to look janky. You can use the SmoothScroll (http://www.smoothscroll.net/) plugin to smooth this out, however there maybe performance implications that need investigating.

To Do / Ideas

• Re-calculate values on rotate / change window size
• Elastic bouncing values at edges of screen (if possible)
• Optimise: Do not update elements with bounds that are off screen
• Implement a tween for scroll wheels to remove reliance on smoothscroll
• Add "momentum" option