CSS True Titles

A title sequence made with CSS in the style of the True Detective opening.

http://lab.tylergaw.com/css-true-titles/

I wrote an article talking in more detail about the masking and animations. It lives here: http://tylergaw.com/articles/css-true-titles

Problems

• CSS mask support is currently limited to blink/webkit. I'm only seeing it work on Chrome (v32.x) and Mobile Safari (whatever version is on iOS 7.x) http://caniuse.com/css-masks
• High Res/Retina displays hate this demo. I think it's just too much moving around. Those big raster images and masks flake out from time to time.
• File size. I'm using a number of large images with transparency so the page weight is about 4.3 MB. Ouch.
• Crashes Mobile Safari and Chrome for iOS pretty consistently.

Reference

• CSS mask tutorial on HTML5 Rocks http://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/masking/adobe
• CSS masking spec http://www.w3.org/TR/css-masking-1
• animation-play-state docs on MDN https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/animation-play-state

What did I learn?

• Strange rendering issues occur when attempting heavy lifting on Retina displays
• background-size: cover Is very helpful for keeping images from becoming too small, however using it is also tricky. It's much harder to have things appear exactely how you want. You kind of have to let go and allow the browser to do what it wants.
• When moving things with CSS always use translate in place of updating left/right/top/bottom position or background-position. Paul said it here On this demo I saw it first hand. When not using translate animations were choppy and CPU usage was through the roof.