10 Best CSS Animation Courses to Take in 2023
Here is a guide with the best online courses to learn CSS Animation, the preferred method for creating web animation given its performance, simplicity, accessibility and browser support.
So, you have finished a web development course teaching you HTML and CSS with a small section on CSS Animations that got you extremely excited. You are now wondering: “Where can I learn more about animations and bring life to my next project?”
While searching for CSS Animation, I could hardly find tutorials and wondered if there were people like me, who were stuck looking for Animation tutorials without Javascript. Javascript is great and can be used for complex animations but that requires learning a new programming language again and I just wanted to make subtle animations to make my project more dynamic and engaging.
So, here are a few of my top picks to learn CSS Animation. Click on one to skip to the course details:
| Course | Workload | In Brief |
| 1. Hello Animation (HTML Academy) | 1 hour | Best free course to understand animation |
| 2. Learn CSS Animation with Jad Khalili (Scrimba) | 2 hours | Best free course available through interactive learning |
| 3. Level Up Your CSS Animation Skills (Donovan Hutchinson) | 3.5 hours | Best free CSS Animation course with examples |
| 4. CSS Animation Tutorial (The Net Ninja) | 2 hours | Best free YouTube course available |
| 5. CSS: Animation (Val Head) | 2 hours | One of the few free courses on Linkedin covering SVG Animation |
| 6. CSS – MASTERING ANIMATIONS (Driss Boumlik) | 13 hours | One of the best paid courses with projects |
| 7. Creative Advanced CSS Animations – Create 100 Projects! (Ahmed Sadek) | 13 hours | More Advanced projects to get you acquainted with CSS Animations |
| 8. SVG & CSS Animation – Using HTML & CSS (Codewithsam) | 2 hours | One of the best paid SVG Animation courses available with CSS and javascript |
| 9. 5 HTML, CSS & JS Mini Projects – Scroll Animation, Rotating Navigation, Drag Events, etc (Traversy Media) | 2 hours | One of the best youtube project based course with CSS and javascript |
| 10. JavaScript Game: Interactive Questions With CSS Transitions & Animations (learnwebcode) | 1 hour | Use CSS and Javascript to create an interactive game |
| 11. Bonus Material (Advanced Animations and Tools) | NA | A collection of resources and tools to help you create your CSS animations |
What are CSS Animations?
CSS animations is a proposed module for Cascading Style Sheets that allows the animation of HTML document elements using CSS.
Why should you learn CSS Animations when you can create animations using javascript?
CSS Animations are preferred over JavaScript in for several reasons such as:
- Performance: CSS Animations are typically smoother and faster than JavaScript animations because they are hardware-accelerated and run on the browser’s compositor thread, rather than the main JavaScript thread.
- Simplicity: CSS Animations are generally simpler to implement and maintain than JavaScript animations. With CSS, you can animate elements with a few lines of code, whereas JavaScript animations require more complex logic and code.
- Accessibility: CSS Animations can be controlled with CSS and are accessible to users with assistive technologies, such as screen readers. JavaScript animations, on the other hand, may not be accessible to all users.
- Browser support: CSS Animations have good browser support, meaning they work on most modern browsers. This is not always the case with JavaScript animations, as some browsers may not support certain JavaScript features.
So, let’s learn some Animation with CSS.
Best Courses Guides Methodology
I built this ranking following the now tried-and-tested methodology used in previous Best Courses Guides (you can find them all here). It involves a three-step process:
- Research: I started by leveraging Class Central’s database with 100K online courses and 200K+ reviews. Then, I made a preliminary selection of 40 courses by rating, reviews, and bookmarks.
- Evaluate: I read through reviews on Class Central, Reddit, and course providers to understand what other learners thought about each course and combined it with my own experience as a learner.
- Select: Well-made courses were picked if they presented valuable and engaging content and they have to fit in a set of criteria and be ranked accordingly: comprehensive curriculum, affordability, release date, ratings and enrollments.
Course Ranking Statistics
Here are some aggregate stats about the ranking:
- Over 15k people are following HTML and CSS on Class Central.
- All of the courses in this ranking require a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS.
- 7 of the courses in this ranking are free, free-to-audit, or have free-trial, whereas the rest are paid.
- Most of the courses are suitable for CSS-Animation beginners.
Without further ado, let’s go through the top picks.
1. Hello Animation (HTML Academy)
My first pick is the Hello Animation course offered for free by HTML Academy. The course is a mix of theory and practice. You start with some basic animation and then handle animations of multiple objects simultaneously using keyframes.
By the end of this course you will be familiar with keyframes and creating basic and even some complex animations.
What You’ll Learn
You will learn to rotate, slide, transform simple objects and even send a rocket to space. The course will get you acquainted with keyframes, pre and post animation states and animation timing with 32 practice tutorials.
How You’ll Learn
There is a theoretical side and a practical side to the course, you will first be given some theory to understand the concepts and then move to practicing what you have read in the theory. There are 32 hands-on exercises to get you familiarized with the basics of CSS Animation.
| Provider | HTML Academy |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 1 Hour |
| Certificate | None |
2. Learn CSS Animation with Jad Khalili (Scrimba)
This is a pro course offered by Scrimba. Learn CSS Animation with Jad Khalili is available for free on youtube. You will learn CSS Animation by solving real-world problems when doing front-end development.
The course covers various techniques for adding transitions and customizing them, as well as how to define animations and control timing. The course also teaches different types of transforms, including scaling, translation, rotation, and skew, and how to apply them to elements. Additionally, it covers the use of CSS variables and timing functions to control animation behavior. It also covers the use of prefixes to ensure cross-browser compatibility. You will be able to test and review all that you have learnt in the course with some real world challenges.
What You’ll Learn
The course will teach you transitions, customizing transitions and working on a real world transition challenge. It will then proceed to explain animations and timings in animation with another real world challenge. The last challenge would be to work on a logo with transformations and translations and creating custom timing functions.
How You’ll Learn
You will learn by watching the video and following the material with the instructor.
| Institution | Scrimba |
| Provider | Youtube |
| Instructor(s) | Jad Khalili |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | 2 Hours |
| Views | 30k |
| Likes | 950 thumbs up |
| Certificate | Paid (on their website) |
Fun Facts
- The course is a paid course and is taught interactively on the Scrimba website.
- Scrimba has a Discord Community.
- This course is also available on Scrimba.
3. Level Up Your CSS Animation Skills (Donovan Hutchinson)
This free course was created by Donovan Hutchinson. The course is also available as a paid course with a certificate on Udemy. The course is meant for intermediate CSS learners.
What You’ll Learn
The course covers different types of animations that can be used on websites, including hero headers, touch and hover animations, scroll animations, carousels, and responsive animations. It provides step-by-step instructions on how to create each type of animation, as well as examples that can be downloaded for reference. The article covers topics such as animating backgrounds, introducing titles, adding scroll cues, simplifying keyframes, and using JavaScript to make carousels work. It also discusses how to make animations responsive by using font-size, percentages, and viewport units.
How You’ll Learn
You’ll learn by watching the course video and practicing what the instructor has taught in the video.
| Provider | Youtube |
| Instructor(s) | Donovan Hutchinson |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | 3-4 hours |
| Views | 59,209 views |
| Certificate | Paid (on Udemy) |
Fun Facts
- Donovan has a free Animation book if you want to get the basics cleared.
- He also has a website for CSS Animation
- You can find one of his recent articles here
- If you want the certificate from Udemy you can find it here.
4. CSS Animation Tutorial (The Net Ninja)
This free course is meant for beginners with about 2 hours of learning material from Net-Ninja, with the enthusiastic and straightforward instructor Shaun.
What You’ll Learn
The tutorials cover a wide range of topics, from the basics of CSS animations to more advanced techniques such as transforms, transitions, keyframes and more. These tutorials can help you learn how to create animations that will make your website come to life and stand out from the competition. From mastering animation fill mode and direction, to chaining animations and animating complex elements like pop-ups and shopping carts, these tutorials will give you the tools and knowledge you need to take your web development skills to the next level.
How You’ll Learn
The tutorials are very short with the longest video being 10 minutes. You’ll learn by watching the course video and practicing what the instructor has taught in the video.
| Channel | The Net Ninja |
| Provider | YouTube |
| Instructor | Shaun |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 2 hours |
| Views | 990,079 views |
| Likes | 10K |
| Certificate | None |
Fun Facts
- The Net Ninja courses are usually highly rated among the best courses on Class Central.
- Shaun is a traveler, musician and a coffee enthusiast.
5. CSS: Animation (Val Head)
Val Head’s free course on Linkedin Learning is one of the first courses in the list to introduce SVG Animation using CSS. You shall get acquainted with CSS Animation but also get to understand some Vector Graphics through the course.
What You’ll Learn
This course includes information on using CSS transforms and transitions, working with animation-delay and animation-fill-mode, and timing and easing CSS animations. The course also covers animating elements in place, animating sprite images, chaining multiple animations, and animating SVG images. Additionally, it discusses strategies for creating high-performance CSS animations and how to optimize them to ensure smooth performance.
How You’ll Learn
Val introduces CSS transforms and transitions—the foundation of most CSS animations—and shows how to keyframe simple animations and adjust their timing, fill-mode, and direction. She also covers looping and chaining animations, animating HTML and SVG elements, optimizing animation performance, best uses for CSS animations right now, and the current level of support and performance and how we can expect that to change in the future. Val presents the lessons as a short series of building block animations—common things you might want to do with animations—then puts those techniques together in a small project of an animated infographic so you can see them all in action.
| Provider | Linkedin Learning |
| Instructor(s) | Val Head |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | 2 hours |
| Enrollments | 20k |
| Rating | 4.7 (137 ratings) |
| Certificate | Paid (Linkedin Learning) |
Fun Fact
- The course does not require an IDE, you can work along using Github Codespaces.
6. CSS – MASTERING ANIMATIONS (Driss Boumlik)
CSS – MASTERING ANIMATIONS by Driss Boumlik is one of the best paid courses available on Udemy with a 4.9 star rating.
What You’ll Learn
You will learn to animate colors, shadows, move and rotate things. You will also learn to create Menus and checkboxes, spinners and forms.
How You’ll Learn
The course provides hands-on learning with small projects.
| Provider | Udemy |
| Instructor(s) | Driss Boumlik |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 2 Hours |
| Enrollments | 15k |
| Rating | 4.9 (383 ratings) |
| Certificate | Paid |
7. Creative Advanced CSS Animations – Create 100 Projects! (Ahmed Sadek)
If you want to take another course after completing the previous one, Creative Advanced CSS Animations – Create 100 Projects would be my recommendation.
What You’ll Learn
The course provides step-by-step instructions on how to create more than 100 different examples of animations, transitions, and transforms using CSS. The goal of the course is to empower learners to be able to create any creative CSS animations they can think of. The course also covers the CSS clip-path property and how to use it in animating html elements. It covers different techniques of creating buttons, images, cards, loaders, menus, creative effects and so much more. This course will help learners understand how to create various types of animations, transitions and transforms and how to use them to make the website more interactive and engaging.
How You’ll Learn
The course provides videos with hands-on learning and practice.
| Provider | Udemy |
| Instructor(s) | Ahmed Sadek |
| Level | Beginner |
| Workload | 13 Hours |
| Enrollments | 17k |
| Rating | 4.7 (1.756 ratings) |
| Certificate | Paid |
8. SVG & CSS Animation – Using HTML & CSS (Codewithsam)
Courses by CodewithSam are few of the courses covering CSS Animation using SVG. You will learn 3 SVG Animation projects in 2 hours. You will also learn to create SVGs in tools like Adobe Illustrator. All files are provided for students who don’t have the software or just want to code.
This course is an intermediate level course with CSS Animations and it’s perfect for both new and experienced web developers who are yet to use SVG within their projects. If you have used HTML and CSS before, you will have the knowledge to follow along with the examples.
What You’ll Learn
The course covers the fundamental techniques used in CSS to create animated SVG elements. SVG images look perfect on any screen size and with the importance of mobile web have become increasingly popular. SVG allows you to create animations and take flat illustrations to a whole new level. By the end of this short course you will have created three separate SVG animations from scratch.
The second course by Codewithsam covers various techniques for animating logos, social icons, text and other elements on a website. It provides step-by-step instructions creating a hand-drawn text effect using CSS. It also explains different CSS animation properties and how to use them. Additionally, it covers the use of gradients over text and icons, including how to make them work cross-browser. The course also discusses using masks and the CodePen tool to create animations, as well as an introduction to optimizing SVG images online.
How You’ll Learn
Lessons are taught with video screencasts, explained in detail as we work through real projects created directly for this course.
| Provider | Udemy |
| Instructor(s) | Codewithsam |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | 2 Hours |
| Enrollments | 10k |
| Rating | 4.5 (1,073 ratings) |
| Certificate | Paid |
Fun Facts
- CodewithSam has two courses on SVGs and Animating SVGs. The second course can be found here. This is one of the best rated courses on Udemy.
9. 5 HTML, CSS & JS Mini Projects – Scroll Animation, Rotating Navigation, Drag Events, etc (Traversy Media)
This free course covers 5 of the 50 projects that Traversy Media teaches in its animation course on Udemy. The course is a purely project based course. I am placing the course towards the end of the list since a knowledge of javascript is required. The course teaches you to make animations using Vanilla JS. The full course on Udemy is about 18 hours long.
What You’ll Learn
The course covers 5 projects:
- Scroll Animation Project
- Rotating Navigation Project
- Login Input Wave
- Animated 3D Boxes Project
- Hoverboard Project
How You’ll Learn
You will learn how to manipulate the DOM using Javascript and create the animations by following along.
| Institution | Traversy Media |
| Provider | YouTube |
| Instructor(s) | Brad Traversy |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | 2 Hours |
| Views | 75k |
| Likes | 3k |
| Certificate | None |
Additional info
- You can find the full course with all 50 projects on this paid Udemy course.
10. JavaScript Game: Interactive Questions With CSS Transitions & Animations (learnwebcode)
This is a part of Brad’s free coding bootcamp that can be found here. You will learn how to build a simple Math game in javascript with CSS Animations and Transitions
What You’ll Learn
You will learn to use javascript and create some basic CSS Transitions and Animations with this game.
How You’ll Learn
You will learn by following the course along with the video on YouTube.
| Institution | learnwebcode |
| Provider | YouTube |
| Instructor(s) | Brad |
| Level | Intermediate |
| Workload | 1 Hour |
| Views | 22k |
| Likes | 1k |
| Certificate | None |
You can find more of Brad’s premium courses here.
11. Bonus Material (Advanced Animations and Tools)
Once you have completed some of the basics of CSS Animations and can understand some of the tricks used in creating them, I would recommend you to look at some of the videos by Kevin Powell and WebDevSimplified. They have covered tons of things with CSS and are good resources to simply learn CSS. Here are two of the complex animations from them:
- 3D CSS – lighting, animations, and more! From Kevin Powell and
- Can I Create This VERY Complex CSS Animation? From WebDevSimplified
If you want to add some animations quickly, without having to create them from scratch, here are some useful websites:
If you have more links that could help, please do not hesitate to mention them in the comments.
