55 JavaScript Scroll Effects

This Parallax Jungle Leaves Reveal creates a cinematic opening for a landing page. As the user scrolls, dense layers of tropical SVG leaves part ways - some moving left, some right - while smaller leaves float randomly in the background. The effect culminates in the reveal of a typography-based logo, creating a sense of depth and discovery perfect for storytelling or adventure-themed websites.

This Scroll-Triggered Text Highlight effect mimics the experience of marking important passages with a highlighter pen as you read. Using GSAP ScrollTrigger, the highlights animate seamlessly from left to right exactly when the text enters the reader’s viewport. The component offers multiple visual styles (full background, half-height, or underline) and fully supports dark mode, making it an excellent addition to long-form articles, documentation, or educational content.

This Scroll-Driven Image Swapper demonstrates the bleeding edge of web animation. It uses the native CSS Scroll-driven Animations API to create a complex parallax-like effect where two columns of different heights scroll in sync. As you scroll, the images in the shorter column slide and crossfade to match the context of the taller column. Crucially, the code implements a Progressive Enhancement strategy: it checks for native browser support and falls back to GSAP ScrollTrigger for browsers that haven’t implemented the spec yet.

The Sticky Observer Navigation is a performance-first header component designed for modern landing pages. It uses an elegant dark-blue color palette with “Abril Fatface” typography to create a high-contrast, premium look. The navigation intelligently shrinks and hides the central title as the user scrolls, providing more screen real estate for content while maintaining essential link icons within a fixed bar.

This ScrollMagic Pizza Assembly Animation transforms a standard product landing page into an interactive storytelling experience. As the user scrolls down, individual pizza ingredients - peppers, mushrooms, olives - fly in from different directions to assemble a complete pizza. The sequence is tightly choreographed using GSAP timelines pinned to the scroll position, giving the user direct control over the “cooking” process.

This Ink Transition Scroll Effect brings digital storytelling to life by mimicking the organic spread of ink on paper. Designed for a biography page, it reveals images using a “splatter” transition triggered by scrolling. It combines ScrollMagic for timing, GSAP for smooth text entry, and CSS Sprites for the complex ink mask animation.

This GSAP ScrollSmoother Parallax Gallery represents a high-end implementation of scroll-based storytelling suitable for portfolios or luxury brand landing pages. It leverages the full power of the GreenSock ecosystem - specifically the premium ScrollSmoother and SplitText plugins - to create a “buttery” smooth scroll experience where content reveals itself with elegant, staggered animations and depth-inducing parallax.

An immersive scrolling experience where the user flies through a cloud of photos that smoothly approach and fade away, revealing an elegantly emerging text.

A suite of volumetric typographic experiments where depth is simulated by stacking multiple DOM layers along the Z-axis using transform-style: preserve-3d.

An immersive scrolling experience blending smooth typography with a floating 3D particle field powered by Three.js. GSAP orchestrates the camera movement and dynamic text highlighting, creating a synchronized parallax journey.

As you scroll down, a large image of a field shrinks and gets cropped by white blocks to focus attention, while a heading on the left counts up the percentage of water saved, changing color for emphasis. This creates the feel of a dynamic infographic.

A premium smooth-scrolling interface orchestrated by GSAP’s ScrollSmoother plugin. The layout leverages CSS Grid for overlapping compositions, while declarative data-speed attributes drive distinct parallax velocities for text and imagery, creating a layered, depth-rich browsing experience.

An animated vertical timeline where historical event cards slide in from alternating sides as they enter the viewport upon scrolling.

A fluid, tactile selection interface where elements “live” and react to scroll, creating a “fisheye” or lens effect.

A horizontal scroll interface featuring a “lens” effect powered by CSS Scroll-Driven Animations (animation-timeline: view(inline)).

A modern, visually appealing content grid that smoothly assembles on scroll, adapting seamlessly to any screen size.

A sophisticated scroll-hijacking gallery that emulates inertia using a virtual scroll container and requestAnimationFrame. JavaScript orchestrates complex 3D transforms - calculating rotation and translation based on intersection ratios - while the layout relies on a fixed CSS grid.

This demo is a masterclass in scroll-driven animation, where GSAP’s ScrollTrigger plugin choreographs multiple, layered effects. A fluid parallax effect is created by using scrub: 1 to tie the yPercent and rotation of decorative elements directly to the scrollbar. This is complemented by a sophisticated text reveal, where GSAP’s SplitText plugin animates characters into view with a staggered opacity and y tween, demonstrating a powerful and modular approach to building complex, interactive scrolling experiences.

Experience a classic “pinned” horizontal scroll effect, where a vertical scroll action is converted into horizontal movement. GSAP’s pin: true property freezes the section in place, while a tween animates the x property of the inner container, creating a cinematic, side-scrolling gallery.

This demo uses a single scroll event listener to calculate the individual progress of each list item as it enters the viewport. The progress value is then passed to a CSS Custom Property, which drives a staggered transform: scale() and opacity animation for a fluid, app-like reveal effect.

This infinitely scrolling image grid employs an IntersectionObserver with baton-passing observation to dynamically load content from the Pixabay API, creating cards through DOM manipulation as the user scrolls. JavaScript manages the paginated requests while CSS Grid provides responsive layout adaptation, with custom properties enabling seamless dark/light theme switching and clip-path animations.

A complex technical example demonstrating how to ensure animation functionality even without CSS animation-timeline: scroll() support. The code first checks for support and, if absent, uses GSAP ScrollTrigger as a polyfill for scroll-driven animation.

This demo showcases advanced THREE.js implementation using coordinate wrapping and custom shaders to create a highly performant, infinitely scrollable and draggable WebGL grid with motion-based visual feedback.

A dynamic image skew effect in pure Vanilla JS, where the transformation angle directly depends on the page’s scroll velocity, providing unique and responsive visual feedback.

A smooth vertical timeline featuring scroll-triggered element animation, implemented using efficient pure JavaScript DOM visibility tracking to enhance performance and content engagement.

A demonstration of per-character text manipulation using Splitting.js to create a striking CSS glitch animation, where each character receives a unique set of random custom properties for varied and dynamic text reveal effects.

An elegant text reveal effect that uses the Intersection Observer API for lazy-loading animation upon entering the viewport and relies on GSAP to perform a smooth “wipe” using a scale transformation.

Impressive scroll-triggered element reveal implemented using the native Intersection Observer API and styling based on CSS Custom Properties for cascading animations.

A demo of the scroll zoom effect via dynamic element visibility calculation and utilizing the Intersection Observer API for performance enhancement.

Pure JavaScript and CSS demonstrate how to replace a heavily pixelated placeholder with a full-size image using the data-src attribute and switching the image-rendering styles.

An advanced gallery UX pattern where view switching (List/Grid) uses GSAP Flip for calculating and executing complex transitions, and the hover preview effect is controlled by precise mouse events with debounce logic.

An interactive demo showcasing slide transitions via destructive digital effects. It uses WebGL shaders to create realistic VHS distortion, static, and pixelation.

This demo uses the JavaScript IntersectionObserver API to create a smart-scrolling navigation that appears on scroll and highlights the active section, all without performance-heavy event listeners.

A practical example of a full-page scroller built with GSAP, featuring an infinite loop via gsap.utils.wrap. The core animation uses nested containers for a split-reveal effect, while text comes alive with a staggered animation on individual characters thanks to SplitText.

Technically, this is an example of using GSAP for “in” and “out” element animations based on scroll position. The code effectively uses callback functions like onEnter, onEnterBack, and onLeave to manage element states, making them visible only when needed.

See how vertex and fragment shaders in Three.js are used to create a “living image” effect that reacts to scrolling. The technical focus is on the deformation (uOffset) and RGB shift (uRGBShift) controlled via GSAP.

A fullscreen horizontal scroll with unique infinite loop logic based on dynamic content cloning, complemented by a progress indicator.

An immersive scroll animation built on GSAP (ScrollTrigger) and Three.js. Features include 3D model loading, volumetric lighting, and dynamic animation parameters that can be easily adjusted via a control panel.

This isn’t just a simple scroll effect—it’s an artistic display of a custom-built disintegration animation. It leverages GSAP’s ScrollTrigger to control the precise, chaotic fade-out of an image rendered from the DOM.