The term Parallax originated from Greek “Parallaxis” which essentially means an “alteration.” To make things clear, in web design, it refers to an illusion of depth created by animating altering layers of images and keeping the foreground images faster than the ones at the background.
The concept became popular when Nike launched a unique and out of the box design website named “Nike Better World.” The site won admiration all over the internet for its brilliant Parallax scrolling interface.The concept has been extensively used for video games since the 1980’s and was later used to make amazing websites. Today, it is fast becoming the most sought-after trend in web design and pretty much all startups want to on a Parallax scrolling website.
For one thing, parallax makes your brand look chic and professional, plus you can provide a plethora of information in a very light manner, making it easier to remember for the customer. With the advent of online logo and monogram makers, it is easier to get custom logo design for your company, but what most entrepreneurs tend to overlook is that every element of your branding is just as important and you need to make your customers feel how seriously you take your image for them. Your website needs to look up-to-date and creative enough for them to want to visit it often. If they like it, they might as well click on the ‘buy’ button; hence, boosting your conversion rate.
Therefore, we decided to create a resource page where our readers could find the best Parallax design tutorials for their websites. Some of them are for beginners while some require professional knowledge of JavaScript and CSS3 properties. Have a look!
1. Simple Parallax Scrolling Tutorial
This tutorial at ihatetomatoes is aimed at junior level and mid developers learning the html setup for a parallax website. It also teaches how a background image can be animated at a varying speed from page scrolling.
2. Nikebetterworld Parallax Effect Demo
Ian Lunn wrote this tutorial to take his original jQuery Parallax Script and recreate a webpage that is similar to Nikebetterworld. The original script manipulated CSS to make multiple backgrounds move at different speeds relative to the users’ movement of the scroll bar.
3. Super Scroll Orama
This awesome source created by John Polacek and Jan Paepke provides jQuery plugin for a very cool scroll animation. They also have a new version available in their website, so don’t forget to check that out.
4. Jazz up a Static Web Page with Subtle Parallax
A few interesting aspects that this tutorial covers are that it makes use of a mobile-first fluid adaptation of the skeleton boilerplate. Secondly, it uses Alexander Prinzhorn’s skrollr.js to create the parallax effect. Moreover, it optimizes the CSS by using Sass workflow.
5. Parallax Scrolling Website using Stellar.js
This is a long and detailed tutorial explaining what Parallax is in the first place and then helping readers learn a way to practice it on their own websites. To explain, it uses a simple four slide website which implements the effect on various images and backgrounds.
6. Parallax Effect
This is a JavaScript tutorial that explains several techniques such as parallax effect, thumbnail shifting, Sequential Window Opening by Robby Leonardi. It focuses on the simplified versions of the significant codes to implement those techniques.
7. Fluid CSS3 Slideshow with Parallax Effect
You are going to learn how a slideshow can be createdusing parallax effect by using properties of CSS3 such as radio buttons and sibling combinators for controlling the slides to be shown. There are two backgrounds and the idea is to change their positions along with the position of the slider in order to create a parallax effect.
8. A Cool Website with Fancy Scrolling Effects
This tutorial uses two readily available jQuery plugins to create an interesting single portal website. It also incorporates, what the writer calls, fancy scrolling effects with parallax illusions, making it pretty awesome for your business.
9. CSS3 Parallax Scrolling Slider
In parallax scrolling, we see the action of several layers shifting and this tutorial applies the effect for vertical slider. What makes it special is that it does not use javascript, instead, it only uses pure CSS3 properties.
10. JinvertScroll
This tutorial has been created for professional web designers and developers who understand the limitations of horizontal parallax scrolling as it explains a very convenient setup for a lightweight plugin for jQuery that helps in moving horizontally with a parallax effect.
11. Parallax Content Slider with CSS3 and JQuery
If you want to create a simple parallax content slider, here is a tutorial that will help you make it by using controlled CSS animations for every element in the slider individually and achieve a parallax effect by animating the slider background itself.
12. Funky Parallax Background Effect Using JQuery
Here is yet another tutorial for horizontally scrolling Website using jQuery with a parallax scrolling background effect. The effect is surprisingly similar to the old-school 2D platform games like Sonic hedgehog.
13. Parallax Gallery
This is another very interesting source that explains the method to create a Flash parallax scrolling gallery from the scratch. Typically, most of the 2D games or animations make use of parallax scrolling with different rates of speed for background images and foreground images. This provides an illusion of depth as foreground images move faster than the ones at the back.
14. Parallax Scrolling Website Interface With JQuery and CSS
This is yet another parallax scrolling web design tutorial with a navigation menu inspired by Nike Better World. It uses both jQuery and CSS properties to achieve the end result.
Conclusion:
If you found the above links useful, feel free to suggest and share what more could be helpful to the business community.
Evan, that was really a helpful guide.