More and more web design companies are using these generic out of the box jquery animations. I am glad jquery and other libraries offer easy to use animation but it’s really getting out of control. The problem with any out of the box or premade template is that it’s generic, and usually not that great. It’s a starting point and not suppose to be used on every single element on the page!
There really is no need to have both a fade in and a slide in from the side. It just looks bad, it’s too much. The eye can’t really comprehend what is going on with both a fade and a slide all at the same speed. It just creates visual chaos and in my opinion a really bad visual experience for the user. Having this on a slider ok, might be okay but why in the hell would you want it on the slider, and then on the section below the slider then on the section below that and so and and so fourth until your whole page is nothing but a bunch of crap flying around on the page.
Don’t get me wrong used in the right way, Parallax animation is awesome. But the problem is not many people are using it in the right way. It’s something to be creative with and doesn’t fit all or even most websites. These sites are like the people who are really bad at Photoshop. They get this push button action effect and using it through out all their photos and think it looks really cool or even good! But anyone who is good with Photoshop knows that it’s crap. It’s just some gimmick push button action this so called “expert” or “designer” bought or downloaded and it doesn’t really make them an expert or even a designer for that matter.
Then we have functional things like the lazy loader. Which loads the images after you scroll down the page. This actually serves a purpose of not downloading too many elements and makes the page load faster. Very useful for multiple youtube embeds on a page, some how though someone came along and said hey lets make the elements slide in from the sides too! Bad decision. And now it’s a huge Design Trend that is really a bad web animation trend and since everyone is doing it, all the websites look the same. Why? Because no one is creating a custom or enhanced version they are just using the choppy settings right out of the box.
It seems that most of these trends are getting pushed out from the template design community. Programmers out there are trying to come up with something fresh and different than all the other templates out there. Which is fine but it is totally beside me why the rest of the community looks at these templates and decides hey this is how I am going to build my sites. Of course most of the legitimate web design businesses aren’t using templates but a majority of the non legitimate types whom are just template installers and content adders are. And in which case they don’t know are even comprehend how this animation is going on in the first place, let alone have the skill sets to tweak it to actually make it look good or not bombard your visual sense to the point of not knowing what the hell is going on with the page in general.