33 great examples of parallax scrolling websites

It's a hot new technique in web design, but can backfire if overused. Check out these great examples of parallax scrolling done well...

With new technologies like HTML5 and CSS3, it's becoming possible to create more advanced, interesting and remarkable effects in the browser. While these effects can be gimmicky, when employed in the right way they can result in a remarkable and memorable website.

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One big web design trend of the moment is parallax scrolling, which involves the background moving at a slower rate to the foreground, creating a 3D effect as you scroll down the page. It can sometimes be overwhelming, but when used sparingly it can provide a nice, subtle element of depth.

To show how it should be done, we've collected together sites that employ the technique to good effect. In some cases the parallax scrolling is the star of the show; in others it simply adds a touch of depth that makes the foreground seem to pop out a little. We hope you find this a useful source of inspiration for your next project, and if you come across any creative examples that we've not listed, we'd love to hear about them in the comments.

• Also read: Build a parallax scrolling website: pro tips

01. La Moulade

La Moulade features an unusual navigation widget that floats at the top

An example of the growing number of sites that use the scroll position of the page to generate animation and movement, this design for French agency La Moulade also features an unusual navigation widget that floats at the top, showing both where you are, and providing quick access to other areas.

02. Marmoset

Spotify might want to start watching its back with this new music site

Set up by a team of hard-working musical artists, Marmoset helps you to create the 'soundtrack to your story', whilst fighting the good fight to restore value and respect for music and its creators.

The killer feature here is the way Marmoset lets you find the kind of music you like according to variables such as 'energy', 'length' and 'genre'. Some cool parallax scrolling effects and striking photography are icing on the cake, making its offering all the more compelling.

03. Health Service Payouts

This online infographic highlights the problem of health compensation payout culture

Whether medical services are provided privately or publically, the issue of huge compensation payments is a growing concern for health organisations across the globe. And this online infographic highlights the problem using an eye-raising scrolling technique.

As you scroll down the page, you follow a hospital porter pushing a trolley through sections of a corridor. Each section represents a different year in the history of Britain's National Health Service, and a pop-up balloon shows details of the biggest compensation payout of that year. It's a simple device, but perfectly executed and an engaging way to convey a lot of information on a dry, albeit important, subject.

"The pieces were built using some the latest techniques in HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript," explains Stickyeyes, the agency who created the infographic for Express Solicitors. "As animation was a key factor in this, we primarily used the Skrollranimation library for all of the motion effects. Each of the elements was manually illustrated, then we hijacked the scroll function in order to create the parallax faux-scrolling feature. This was then supported by further CSS3 animations for the finishing touches."

04. We are Unfold

Clever scrolling works well with a sticky top-right nav menu

Here Norwegian agency Unfold uses a combination of endless scrolling and a small amount of parallax to create an unusual and effective website navigation scheme. The principal links between content areas appear at the top right of the window throughout, but when you reach the bottom of the single page design, the page continues to scroll, revealing the top of the page once more.

05. Savings Challenge

The site helps you discover how much you could save on your car

To publicise UK-based car dealership network Arnold Clark's latest promotion, where customers are asked to 'challenge' the salesman in their local dealership to save them money on their monthly motoring outgoings, the in-house web team came up with the idea of a parallax site built on an infographic style - the Savings Challenge site.

"The design is based on the idea of paper money that can be folded into the key element," said the designer, Stephen Kay. "Hence the slogan 'do more with your money'. This folding notion helped formalise not only the initial logo design, but also the potential for a moving, interactive web page. It really lends itself to being animated."

Once in development, the storyboard was split into seven key 'scenes' in order to help manage the workflow and the checking process. The developers used skrollr.js as their core technology to handle user scroll events. This allowed for rapid prototyping, giving more time to smoothing out transitions and building a workable user interface.

Technical challenge

They also made use of grunt.js to assemble handlebars templates and compile their Coffeescript and SASS files. They created a task to reload the page whenever files were altered, allowing them to see changes instantly. To achieve the desired animations, the team used CSS3 3D transforms extensively.

Each scene in the webpage was created as an individual handlebars template, meaning the guys could split the work between them and deal with a scene each rather than pairing up. Splitting the development between two developers - and into smaller, manageable tasks - was paramount to getting the page up swiftly and efficiently.

Thanks to the handlebars and grunt, it was an easy process to thread the individual scenes together and deliver a fully-functional parallax scrolling page in just three weeks. "We're very pleased with what we've managed to achieve in a rather limited time period," the team commented. "But we're confident that, with such strong supporting statistics, the campaign message will speak for itself."

06. Cyclemon

The site features just about every bike type there is

Some say you are what you eat; others say you are what you ride. Here, designers and bike enthusiasts Romain Bourdieuxand Thomas Pomarelle came together to create parallax scrolling site Cyclemon. Teaming gorgeous illustrations, inventive typography and clever scrolling, the site seamlessly comes together.

Going from a hipster to a grandpa, a cougar to a freestyler, the guys have come up with just about every cycle type there is. And it's not just the website that showcases the cycles - Bourdieux and Pomarelle have also created a number of silkscreen bike prints.

Each bike illustration is printed on FabrianoRosaspina white paper in five different handmade colours with a non-toxic technique. Cyclemon is definitely one for the bike-mad designers out there.

07. Lexus

Experience the new Lexus without visiting the showroom on this interactive site

The new Lexus IS is a luxury saloon car, which you can now experience in a completely immersive way before even visiting a showroom. Developed by the team at technology consultancyAmaze, this interactive video allows viewers to fully explore the interior and exterior features of the latest edition to Lexus' hybrid line.

As Lexus' long-term digital partner, Amaze used a combination of live-action footage and CGI to allow viewers to watch and control their viewing experience. Users can do everything from selecting the exterior colour design to understanding more about the controls, precise handling and engineering behind the new car.

Easily accessible

In order for the Amaze team to create a seamless blend between the real and virtual, they filmed the car driving through different landscapes and teamed up with high-end Munich-based 3D visualisations studio RTT to scan and take 360 degree imagery of the environment at key points. Built in HTML5, the experience works across all devices, and features as the content of an app to promote and sell the new model. 

"We have enabled viewers to move easily from a 'passive' watching experience to an active 'immersive' experience, where they can pause the movie to spin and change the colour of the car within the movie itself," says Wendy Stonefield, chief commercial officer at Amaze. "We used the HTML5 Canvas to achieve this and for the interior spins, where users can change the interior colour of the car whilst seeing it in a parallax format, we fused CSS 3D transforms and JavaScript.

"We wanted to create a movie that was beautiful and remarkably sophisticated - something that would be true to the IS and Lexus brand. Our aim was to explain the car's attributes and allow an ultra-high-quality experience to bring the emotion of the drive directly to the viewer through full screen, movie footage."

08. Life in my Shoes

The About page features a lively parallax effect

Life In My Shoes is a powerful multi-platform campaign aimed at
young people that challenges the fear and misunderstanding that surrounds HIV. London-based digital agency Traffic was briefed with developing a website that would appeal to a youth audience.

The brand font, Houshka Rounded Medium, was implemented using font-face to give the website a fresh look and feel. Decorative images and dramatic yellow accents throughout provide an alluring aesthetic.

The "About Us" page features a lively parallax effect that was adjusted for tablets and smartphones. "We wrote a media query for these devices that changes the background-attachment from fixed to scroll and sets the individual background-positions so that the images sit in the right place," explain the Traffic team.

09. The Beast

The folk singer's site self-scrolls as a poem is read out

Folk singer Laura Marling's album, A Creature I Don't Know, was given an accompanying website made by London agencyStudio Juice with illustrations by Shynola. It's a site that self-scrolls as a poem is read out, while vivid illustrations and animations with parallax perspectives are revealed.

The site makes extensive use of new semantic elements and the data-* attributes used to trigger animations at specific audio cue points (such as scene changes, animation cues and so on) and also assigning control speeds and directions of the moving parallax elements.

10. The Lab

This parallax scrolling site is different and instantly engaging

Alzheimer's Research, the UK's leading dementia research charity, aims to communicate information about dementia in an engaging way using its website The Lab.

From idea to treatment, users can scroll through two labs and a clinic, each of which is filled with pop-up information buttons. When clicked, new pages open with details on how scientists' ideas are turned into reality and how this can make a difference for the thousands of people living with the disease.

11. Why Your Brain Craves Infographics

An infographic to end all infographics!

Neo Mam Studios have come up with is beautifully designed and brilliantly executed infographic. An online experience built with HTML5 and CSS3, the challenge in building the infographic was to keep the CSS as simple as possible.

"The parallax scrolling effects were probably the most difficult to achieve," says Neo Mam's Danny Ashton. "Our developers looked at the available libraries and described them as a bit 'wonky', so they ended up creating their own instead."

12. 5emegauche

Each page has its own scrolling mechanism

In most circumstances when you scroll, you're scrolling to a different page. But on this agency's website, each page has its own scrolling mechanism piece or element that makes everything extremely interesting. It's a brilliant and fun approach to parallax design and proves that the technique continues to produce inventive results.

13. Atlantis World's Fair

The Atlantis World's Fair use parallax scrolling to tell their story

An exercise in demonstrating IE9's WOFF support, this online infographic designed by Frank Chimero uses some parallax scrolling not as just a way to present information, but as a way to animate information and to tell the story. A fun and interesting approach to interactive information, this is a perfect example of parallax scrolling.

14. Every last drop

Learn about the problems of water conversion through this brilliant parallax scrolling site

Animation studio Nice & Serious has created this parallax scrolling site to promote the problems of water conversion. Every last drop features a quirky little character, going about his daily tasks, through which the viewer is able to learn more about how water is wasted in our lives, often without us realising it. 

15. Golden State of Mind

Golden State of Mind showcases the best of California

Golden State of Mind was built by JUXT Interactive to showcase, "art, fashion and happenings live from California". Creative director Jeff Whitney comments: "A custom scrollbar plug-in was found and rather heavily modified to allow for the infinite scrolling, and a lot of sweat and tears went into getting the reversed scrolling to work correctly."

16. Living Word

UK-based design agency Tribe developed this parallax scrolling site for translation agency Living Word

When translation agency Living Word requested a re-energising digital relaunch, Tribe took to creating a site to stand apart from the rest. The solution was to develop a parallax effect capable of delivering a large amount of information while maintaining user interest. The idea was a brave one, but it works well, delivering a stunning, interactive and intuitive customer journey.

17. Spotify

Spotify employs subtle use of parallax scrolling on its introductory page

Streaming music app Spotify explains its features and benefits on a landing page that adds a subtle touch of parallax scrolling to its background images.

18. Madwell

New York agency Madwell uses parallax scrolling to add a sense of depth

Design and development agency Madwell, based in New York, show off their portfolio with a range of parallax scrolling effects to create a noticeable 3D style that adds a huge amount of depth.

19. The Jacksonville Downtown Art Walk

The Jacksonville Downtown Art Walk

The Jacksonville Downtown Art Walk is a monthly arts festival that spans more than 15 blocks and takes in dozens of galleries, museums and bars, with street performers and live music. Its beautiful site features a subtle watercolour parallax effect that makes scrolling a joy.

20. Von Dutch

The fashion label Von Dutch tells the story of its original founder by using parallax scrolling to add an element of movement. Icons and images move into and out of place as you scroll down the page, which makes the whole page seem more fluid.

21. Fannabee

Watch the icons as you scroll down the Fannabee page

Fannabee is a site designed for fans of music artists to help show off what they've collected. The concept is introduced using a page that keeps the visual focus front and centre, while the story is explained as you scroll down. Parallax scrolling is also used subtly with the icons in the background, as the icons in the foreground move faster than those in the background to add a level of depth.

22. Peugeot Hybrid4

Peugeot uses parallax scrolling to create an auto-playing web comic

Peugeot has gone all out with using parallax scrolling to create an auto-playing comic in the browser. The comic plays as you scroll down the page (or use their autoplay feature which automatically scrolls) and helps to advertise the car manufacturer's new HYbrid4 technology.

23. Cultural Solutions

Arts consultancy Cultural Solutions employs a subtle parallax scrolling effect to introduce depth to its homepage. Their main brand image is the use of colourful circles - the circles in the background move slower than those in the foreground, creating a subtle 3D effect.

24. jQuery Conference

Last year's jQuery conference features some small, subtle parallax scrolling animations

The website for the 2012 jQuery conference made use of a touch of parallax scrolling in order to add some animation to the design. It's the smaller, subtle effects that make the page seem more fluid, such as the logo and date becoming smaller after you scroll down. The scrolling also triggers animations - like the bicycle that starts to drift off to the right, and the flock of seagulls frantically chasing a shark - which add some personality to the page.

25. Shape

Parallax scrolling adds shape to, er, Shape's homepage

Creative agency Shape uses parallax scrolling to help explain their design process. The animation describes the flow of how they work perfectly, and adds a nice visual touch.

26. Nintendo

Nintendo uses parallax scrolling to take you through the history of Mario Kart

To help show off the launch of Mario Kart on the Wii, videogames maker Nintendo launched a page that used parallax scrolling heavily to take the visitor on a journey through the history of the game. The style of the site follows the style of the game itself, by taking you along a road lined with characters from the game.

27. Activate Drinks

Activate Drinks uses parallax scrolling bubbles to add a third dimension

Activate Drinks is a company that provides drinks with added vitamins. To help tell its story and explain its their approach is different, it's added an element of 3D by placing bubbles in the background, middle ground and foreground. As these layers move at different speeds, the 3D effect is formed as you scroll down the page.

28. The Whitehouse's Iraq Timeline

The White House uses parallax scrolling to heighten the emotion of its Iraq War timeline

To display the timeline of the war in Iraq, the White House used parallax scrolling to tastefully add something unique. While the content scrolls as normal, the emotional background images remain static – which help them to stand out further.

29. Pitchfork Cover Stories

Pitchfork's 'Cover Stories' series has won a host of awards for web design

Renowned music website Pitchfork has gone above and beyond with its 'Cover Stories' series. Making its website look like a lovingly designed print magazine, the features include parallax scrolling, interactive interviews, video content and photography unlike any other.

Masterminded by Pitchfork's creative director Michael Renaud, their interview with British newcomers Savages is the best yet. Moving portrait photography and video content by Se Youngaccompanies insightful text, whilst the music player provides the perfect soundtrack.

30. Green Man

YCN Studio took care of the entire Green Man festival rebrand

Welsh festival Green Man unveiled a brand new website for this year's shenanigans. The illustrations, colours and user experience combined make for a truly stunning parallax scrolling experience.

It was developed by the team at London based agency YCN Studio. Green Man approached them last Autumn, with an intention of giving their branding a good old revamp - everything from the website to the wristbands.

31. Soleil Noir 2012 | We believe in...

This site was originally designed as a greetings card

This wonderfully whimsical site from French interactive studio Soleil Noir was designed as a New Year's card. It uses a simple set of coloured circles as the website navigation, along with some excellent parallax scrolling effects. Sometimes, it pays to be simple.

32. Oakley

Oakley combines parallax scrolling and striking photography in its latest website for the Airbrake MX goggles

Eyewear retailer Oakley has triumphed with this website, crafted for the new Airbrake MX goggle,which combines a cool scrolling effect with striking photography that portrays the product beautifully.

33. Jason Kenny OBE

Bristol-based design agency Fiasco created a vertical scrolling site for Olympic English track cyclist Jason Kenny

Earlier this year, Bristol-based agency Fiasco Design developed this beautiful website for Olympic English track cylist Jason Kenny. Co-founder of Fiasco Design Ben Steers says: "In response to the brief, we decided to create a single page, vertical scrolling site utilising a parallax scrolling technique."

Words: Alex Black and the Creative Bloq staff

Alex Black writes for Print Express, which specialises in business cards and printing in the UK. In his spare time he enjoys studying graphic and web design.