framer/motion VS Tailwind CSS

The two most popular choices now (circa Jan 2024) are React Transition Group, started in 2016, and Framer Motion, started in 2018. I'm not too familiar with the former, so this article solely dives into the workings of AnimatePresence from Framer Motion and how it's able to enable exit animations.

Install Framer Motion with npm install framer-motion.

GitHub: https://github.com/framer/motion

At this point, I was already using a tilt component (react-parallax-tilt) in my portfolio, and after checking this page I had the general idea of how it should be done, a container with transform-style: preserve-3d, with two children, one tilt and the other an image, both having backface-visibility: hidden and the tilt being rotated to face backward at the start. For the animation, I decided to use framer-motion because I was already familiar with it and knew it had what was needed to get the job done (and I'm glad I did because later I needed to await the animation and it was easy with framer-motion).

Two of the most popular animation libraries for React include React Spring [26.1k+ GitHub stars] and Framer Motion [19.6k+ GitHub stars], but there are many to choose from. Arafat Islam has a great list of animation libraries here.

Why should you consider using Framer Motion in your React project? Framer Motion is a fairly popular and actively maintained library, with 19k stars on GitHub, and plenty of resources to support it.

Framer Motion has over 18,000 GitHub stars and 2.2M weekly NPM downloads.

Lastly, Tailwind CSS is a utility-first CSS framework packed with classes like flex, pt-4, text-center, and rotate-90 that can be composed to build any design, directly in your markup.

Tailwind CSS

Sidekiq is already configured along with assets, tailwindsCSS.

Finally, for our front end, we’re going to be pairing Next.js with the great combination of TailwindCSS and shadcn/ui so we can focus on building the functionality of the app and let them handle making it look awesome!

You can use any frontend framework you want — react-based tooling, however, has a natural advantage as it models everything as a function of state, which can map 1:1 with the concept in Burr. In the demo app we use react, react-query, and tailwind, but we’ll be skipping over this largely (it is not central to the purpose of the post).

Tailwind CSS: A utility-first CSS framework for rapidly building custom designs.

First, you need to make sure that you have a working Tailwind CSS project…

Tailwind CSS

With better CSS approaches like TailwindCSS and Vanilla Extract (which we're heavily using) it's much easier to maintain the UI and make sure it doesn't change unexpectedly. No more conflicting CSS classes, much less CSS specificity issues and much less CSS code in general.