Deconstructing the "Whimsical Animations" landing page
21 comments
·February 25, 2025jszymborski
dylan604
If only more people were considerate about the amount of bandwidth their websites serve. I just had a conversation where our system generates a CSV and I feel that we should be zipping the file, but I was overridden with a "people today can download large files easily today" and the "not having to unzip is worth it" reasons.
flutas
Working on mobile it gets even crazier because everything* is shipped to everyone.
"Oh we just need to include this lib for that one tiny thing, who cares."
Turns into
"we're using 7TB of mobile storage around the world for this one tiny feature"
or
"Our app is responsible for ~472TB of mobile storage being used."
(actual numbers I just calculated btw)
*: Some stuff is optimized out, not everything but essentially anything needed to run any part of the app on a users device is included, even if they just need to do one specific thing and nothing else.
andrelaszlo
> It appears that you’ve ticked the “Reduce motion” option in your system settings. As a result, certain whimsical features on this page have been disabled.
I think this is a Windows setting I enabled to get rid of annoying window animations, didn't know it could affect web pages, and I'm not sure I want it to :D
Well it's nice actually, but in this specific case I think I'd like to override it.
simonbarker87
Josh’s first course, CSS for JS Devs was how I finally “learned” CSS after 15 years of working with it.
It’s not just for JS devs of course, I started with C and PHP nearly 20 years ago now, and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to understand things like “why isn’t the z-index doing anything?!?!” and the like.
jasonjmcghee
Idk if there's just something wrong with me, but I feel like every time someone says "look how much better P3 looks" I just think it looks over-saturated and the more muted look of the srgb just looks so much better to me.
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roomey
Wasn't expecting to see Irish there, thank you! Beautiful page also!
mattl
“ Reduced motion detected
It appears that you’ve ticked the “Reduce motion” option in your system settings. As a result, certain whimsical features on this page have been disabled.”
Thank you.
dylan604
Each time something from Josh gets posted here, I find my self realizing how little I know about CSS yet feel like I have a much firmer grasp than most. This individual's dedication to continue pushing things within CSS is something that I am in awe of and much appreciation. I just wish I had such a site where some of his more interesting ideas would be a fit.
He strikes me as someone with a creative tech nerd version of "hold my beer" mentality with much less dire consequences
jsheard
What stands out the most to me on that landing page is that scrolling craters the framerate on my high end phone even though there doesn't seem to be any animations tied to scrolling. Maybe a Chromium browser would handle it better than Firefox, but ugh.
knallfrosch
Works fine on iPhone 13 mini with iOS Safari. It's your browser.
skavi
Safari on an iPhone 13 Pro handles this page without issue. That’s a three generation old high end phone.
the_sleaze_
> The experience is very limited on mobile. If at all possible, I’d strongly encourage you to visit on desktop.
jsheard
I took that to mean "the interactivity is more geared towards mouse input than touch", not "scrolling the page demands a desktop GPU for some reason".
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pinoy420
[dead]
> When I keep them in their native P3 color space, each image is between 50kb and 150kb. With 22 individual images, I’d be sending almost two megabytes of assets, which feels like way too much for decorative images like this!
Love to hear the consideration for folks. I feel like I download twice that in javascript blobs from like 12 analytics companies and ad videos every time I visit e.g. CNN or TechCrunch