Going “Meta GSAP”: The Quest for “Perfect” Infinite Scrolling

I’m not sure how this one came about. But, it’s a story. This article is more about grokking a concept, one that’s going to help you think about your animations in a different way. It so happens that this particular example features infinite scrolling — specifically the “perfect” infinite scroll for a deck of cards without duplicating any of them.

Why am I here? Well, this all started from a tweet. A tweet that got me thinking about layouts and side-scrolling content.

I took that concept and used it on my site. And it’s still there in action at the time of writing.

Then I got to thinking more about gallery views and side-scrolling concepts. We hopped on a livestream and decided to try and make something like the old Apple “Cover Flow” pattern. Remember it?

My first thoughts for making this assumed I’d make this so it works without JavaScript, as it does in the demo above, in a way that uses “progressive enhancement.” I grabbed Greensock and ScrollTrigger, and off we went. I came away from that work pretty disappointed. I had something but couldn’t quite get infinite scrolling to work how the way I wanted. The “Next” and “Previous” buttons didn’t want to play ball. You can see it here, and it requires horizontal scrolling.

So I opened up a new thread on the Greensock forum. Little did I know I was about to open myself up to some serious learning! We solved the issue with the buttons. But, being me, I had to ask whether something else…