What are the strongest arguments in favor of the current marketing design trend of fading in and slightly translating page elements as they scroll into view? (e.g. clearmotion.com, apple.com/macbook-pro/, everlane.com/about, etc)
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Originally I think it was a fast loading time hack so you could have large marketing assets without loading them all up front and losing page views because of load times.
Now? 🤷♂️ Cargo cult?
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also, small detail, but i revisited it a few months ago and was impressed by how small the type seemed to me
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Everlane does it so they look more like Apple; ClearMotion does it so they look more like Everlane. (& at each step, the effect gets less subtle.) Big question to me is, why does Apple do it?
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One fun experiment: Scroll to the bottom, to pre-run the animations. Then try scrolling through from the top. How does it feel different from the version with animations?
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The best I've concluded is that it is just another part of the powerpointification of the web: scrolljacking to act as slides, large fonts with little text, hero images per slide, and also these build-ins.
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Ah. So charitably, better control of pacing and narrative. Uncharitably, might be a better match to design review than to deployment.
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Other (more specific) thoughts:
- it draws the eye to particular elements
- borrows language from motion graphics where subtle movement like that is common
- which makes the experience more like watching than reading
& can be used as a trick to hide flash from fonts loading
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