A proof-of-concept effect recreation of the animation seen in a prototype app by Marcus Eckert. The idea is to flip a grid item in 3D, expand it to fullscreen and reveal some associated content. We’ve created two demos with a vertical and a horizontal rotation.
we’d like to share a little animation concept with you. It’s the recreation of an effect we spotted in this fantastic prototype app by Marcus Eckert. The idea is to rotate a grid item in 3D, expand it into fullscreen and reveal some content. For our attempt to imitate the app behavior, we created two demos. In the first one we rotate the grid item vertically and in the second one horizontally.
Please note that this is just a proof-of-concept and that we are using several CSS properties that might not work in every browser (pointer-events, 3D Transforms, CSS Transitions). It is highly experimental and for browsers not supporting either one of those properties, we provide a simple fallback that just shows and hides the content.
The amazing illustrations featured in the demos are by Adam Quest. View all images from the Selected editorials 2014 Vol.1 on Behance and visit his Facebook page.
The way we simulate the effect seen in the prototype app video, is by creating a placeholder element that will have a front and a back face. The front will contain a copy of the grid item content and the back will be white. When clicking on a grid item, we add the absolutely positioned placeholder and position it in the clicked item’s position. Then we animate its width and height to the window’s width and height and set the top and left to negative values, making it move outside of the grid into the top left corner of the page. While we are doing that, we’ll also rotate the element in 3D, revealing the white back side of the placeholder. Once it fills the screen, we’ll fade in the content which we stored in a different division.
The illusion, that it’s actually the grid item that flies out and rotates, is completed by fading out the clicked grid item so that we can only see the placeholder being moved out of the grid.
In addition to the placeholder moving towards the viewer, we also move the grid away by translating it on the Z-axis.
Please note, that this is just a proof-of-concept. You might want to load your content dynamically (see the dummy loading effect) or show something else as the main content, i.e. a fullscreen image. The fallback is also very simple and general.