6 Under-The-Radar jQuery Animation Plugins That’ll Knock Your Socks Off

There are plenty of great, useful jQuery plugins out there. It’s great to have those kinds of plugins and know where to find them, and the community has done an excellent job of giving those plugins the attention they deserve.

There’s a whole other class of plugins, however – brilliant masterpieces that make your jaw drop as you go, “Whoa!! How did they do that?!” You don’t find them every day, but they’re definitely out there. Today we’re going to dig through the development community and unearth 6 of those amazing under-publicized animation plugins that are guaranteed to impress every developer-at-heart. Let’s get started!

#1 – Blend


The first one is Blend: a spectacular background animation plugin by Jack Moore. In addition to being cross browser compatible, it has a huge range of interesting options (like ‘pulse’, enabling you to give the background a pulsating effect). And, at only 1.4kb it’s quite small given its amazing background-animation enabling qualities.

#2 – Sexy Curls


This plugin (created and released by Elliot Kember) enables you to easily implement a draggable peel-back effect on any web page – very fascinating. Although not as practical as many other plugins, it’s still an impressive effect implemented in a smart, lightweight manner.

#3 – Roundabout


Written by Fred leBlanc, Roundabout is a carousel-effect type plugin. It allow you to easily create attractive rotating vertical or horizontal lists. To get the full effect, you’ll have to check out Fred’s demo – I know you’ll be amazed.

#4 – Flip


I was so excited when I found Flip – it is meant to create an illusion like an element is being ‘flipped’ around to show the other side, and wow is it awesome. It also has plenty of options, enabling you to flip things at different speeds in different directions. Flip was written by Luca Manno; I highly recommend it.

#5 – Quicksand


Quicksand (by RazorJack) is a filtering/reordering plugin with a really neat set of shuffling animations. You definitely have to see it to get the full effect – I can’t wait to use it in my next project.

#6 – jQZoom


The last one is jQZoom – perhaps less revolutionary than the others but impressive nonetheless. jQZoom (released by MindProjects) is a versatile image magnifying/zooming tool. It would be excellent for ecommerce sites and portfolios.

Special Bonus: 3 More Sources for Exciting Animation Wizardry

If you’re like me, seeing awesome coding work like this makes me want to get out there and start doing it myself. Here are a few extra hand-chosen bonus links to get you started on your journey through jQuery-animation land:

Any questions or other great under-appreciated plugin you know of? Let us know!

Written By Nick Parsons

Nick is the editor of Webitect and a developer + designer from Houston TX.

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24 Comments

  1. agon

    April 10th, 2010 at 03:19 am

    great list man…thanks for sharing it…

  2. Maxi

    April 10th, 2010 at 01:14 pm

    Great resources, really love the roundabout!

  3. BebopDesigner

    April 10th, 2010 at 10:07 pm

    These are handy. Thanks for sharing

  4. Celio Ferreira

    April 11th, 2010 at 09:12 am

    Very good!!! Congratulation!!!

  5. NK

    April 12th, 2010 at 05:34 am

    thanks for sharing, great list

  6. Khalid Janjua

    April 12th, 2010 at 05:35 am

    very nice information, very handy

  7. Notable Tech Posts – 2010.04.11 | The Life of Lew Ayotte

    April 12th, 2010 at 08:35 am

    [...] 6 under the radar jQuery animation plugins that’ll knock your socks off [...]

  8. NewGadgetz

    April 12th, 2010 at 06:46 pm

    Very nice round-up!

  9. 6 Cool jQuery Animation Plugins » robbychen.com Blog

    April 13th, 2010 at 01:57 pm

    [...] 13th, 2010 by Robby Chen Leave a reply » Here is a list of jQuery plugins that I found over here (each link below links to the demo page of the plugin):BlendSexy [...]

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    April 16th, 2010 at 12:02 am

    [...] 6 Under-The-Radar jQuery Animation Plugins Webitect schreibt in einem neuen Blogeintrag über sechs Plugins für jQuery. Darunter findet man Sexy Curls und auch Blend. Mehr lesen. [...]

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    April 20th, 2010 at 02:43 am

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  12. Ecommerce Web Design

    July 9th, 2010 at 04:21 am

    These are Great, thankyou for sharing this, I just tweeted this as well, very useful : )

  13. Tigerchick Edinburgh Web Design

    July 28th, 2010 at 07:07 am

    Have you seen http://spritely.net/ – Very cool indeed!

  14. Julia Wein

    October 20th, 2010 at 09:11 am

    thanks for sharing it. just a pitty i went that heavily in learning fat prototype&script.aculo.us :(

  15. David

    February 1st, 2011 at 01:11 am

    Thanks for this man, the plugins are quite nice and just what I needed to create a slideshow… thx again… david

  16. Ron Williams- Web Designer, Illustrator, Graphic Designer. Also: Awesome.

    March 7th, 2011 at 11:07 am

    [...] http://webitect.net/development/jquery/6-under-the-radar-jquery-animation-plugins-thatll-knock-your-... [...]

  17. Faraz

    March 20th, 2011 at 04:10 am

    All plugins that have been shared here are awesome specially the quicksand ones are really inspiring .

  18. Dieter

    April 11th, 2011 at 04:37 am

    Thank You. Gut geschriebender Artikel

  19. Hans

    April 30th, 2011 at 02:52 am

    very nice work ty for this post

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  22. Rick Feit

    October 18th, 2011 at 03:12 pm

    These are awesome! The page curls and roundabout plugins are really cool, they add a really cool aspect to any web page they are used on.

    Great list, thank you for taking the time to compile it! :)

  23. Mark

    January 4th, 2012 at 10:08 am

    A lot of great jQuery plugins here!
    My personal preference is the I use the blend function, I tend to use this a lot on navigation when CSS3 easing isn’t applicable!
    (example: http://www.threecountiescentre.co.uk/) I like the feel it gives to a website, professional, and thought out.

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