In this tutorial, we’ll explore how to create a custom React Hook called useAnimation that allows us to easily animate elements in our web applications. By the end, you’ll have a reusable hook that you can use in different projects to bring your UI to life.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Setting up the Project
• Creating the useAnimation Hook
• Animating Elements
• Conclusion

Introduction

Animations play a crucial role in enhancing the user experience of a web application. With CSS animations, we can bring elements to life, making our UI more engaging and interactive. However, managing animations using CSS alone can become complex as the number of animations increases. That’s where a custom useAnimation Hook can come in handy.

Setting up the Project

Before we dive into implementing the useAnimation Hook, let’s initialize a new React project.

Open your terminal and run the following command:

npx create-react-app use-animation-hook

Once the project is created, navigate to the project folder:

cd use-animation-hook

Now, let’s install some dependencies required for our project:

npm install styled-components
npm install framer-motion

Creating the useAnimation Hook

In the src folder, create a new file called useAnimation.js. This file will contain our custom useAnimation Hook.

import { useEffect, useRef } from 'react';
import { useAnimation as useFramerMotionAnimation } from 'framer-motion';

const useAnimation = () => {
  const controlsRef = useRef(null);
  const controls = useFramerMotionAnimation();

  useEffect(() => {
    controlsRef.current = controls;
  }, [controls]);

  return controlsRef.current;
};

export default useAnimation;

In the above code, we import the necessary dependencies and define our useAnimation Hook. Inside the Hook, we use the useFramerMotionAnimation from framer-motion to create an animation control.

Animating Elements

Now that we have our useAnimation Hook ready, let’s use it to animate a simple element. In the App.js file, let’s add the following code:

import React from 'react';
import styled from 'styled-components';
import { motion } from 'framer-motion';
import useAnimation from './useAnimation';

const Box = styled(motion.div)`
  width: 200px;
  height: 200px;
  background-color: coral;
`;

const App = () => {
  const animationControls = useAnimation();

  return (
    <Box
      animate={animationControls}
      initial=
      whileHover=
      whileTap=
    />
  );
};

export default App;

In the above code, we import the necessary dependencies, including our useAnimation Hook. We then define a simple Box component that uses the motion.div component from framer-motion. We pass the animationControls to the animate prop of the Box component, which will control the animation.

We set the initial styles of the Box component to have 0 opacity and scale, and define different animation states for when the user hovers over or taps on the box.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to create a custom useAnimation Hook using React. We explored how to set up a basic React project, install the necessary dependencies, and use the useAnimation Hook to animate elements using CSS animations in our web applications.

By encapsulating the logic of managing animations in a reusable Hook, we can easily animate elements across different components and projects. This not only makes our code more maintainable but also allows us to quickly iterate on our UI/UX designs.

Feel free to customize the useAnimation Hook to suit your specific animation needs and explore more advanced animation techniques with framer-motion.

Happy animating! #webdevelopment #reactjs