I’ve often felt like Goldilocks when interacting with websites that utilize parallax. Too many parallax effects in a site can be extremely overwhelming. Too little can seem underwhelming for the excitement of the effect. But when it’s done just right, it can be incredible.
For me, the first time I can recall interacting with parallax within a webpage was in an Apple store, scrolling through a web page on a huge iMac with a magic mouse, feeling amazed. Through the years, I’ve come across parallax utilized in webpages in a lot of different scenarios, but what I tend to favor the most is the intersection of parallax and fashion in web.
Like I mentioned earlier, sometimes too much parallax can be extremely confusing and difficult to navigate. When these scrolling animations are happening in ways + directions that aren’t typical to what you’d expect from a website, I can imagine the experience can be uncomfortable. For this reason, I tend to enjoy when parallax can be used to showcase something cool that isn’t too frustrating of an experience. I understand that in the first place, the target market for these modern, edgy, cool websites is usually a younger crowd, but this doesn’t mean that older users of the internet won’t encounter these websites and need to use them.
For this reason, I find that tasteful parallax is the perfect formula for an exciting website. I think that this intersection of tasteful web design and tasteful content can be found in many fashion websites. We can see a great example here on designer Alicia Moore’s website: https://aliciamoore.com/. The sideways-scrolling carousel is interesting and surprising, but is easy to understand quickly and doesn’t go on for too long—after all, you have to scroll through the entire carousel to get to the bottom of the page. If you make your visitors scroll for too long, they may feel sort of…trapped (and frustrated). For this same reason, I appreciate the way that Alicia’s entire site doesn’t have you scrolling for what seems like forever.
We can see a nice use of parallax on British brand Me + Em’s website here: https://www.meandem.com/. As you scroll down, their announcement about International Returns catches the eye as it takes the center screen. I think the parallax featured in the footer is a nice touch as well.
Lastly, here’s an example of a website that uses parallax in an exciting way, but that may be a little bit too much for some visitors to navigate: http://www.camiloalvarez.com/en/. Sometimes, however, it is on brand for many people working in the Fashion Industry to push boundaries and excite in ways that aren’t as common. With that being said, there are different reasons for a lot of these sites. Of course, if you are running an e-commerce site, too difficult navigation can drive customers away. However, if you are showcasing your work, it might be a great idea to showcase it in an interesting way.
All in all, I believe that parallax used in a tasteful manner can be timeless and quite exciting. I was extremely excited to learn about it because it is such a cool feature of the web and hope to continue learning more about it.