18 brilliant jQuery plugins

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When John Resig developed the jQuery library back in 2006, he can't have imagined that it would become the most popular JavaScript library on the web, or that it would have tens of thousands of plugins written for it. But it's true to say that jQuery, above all other libraries out there, has been embraced by the web design community.

It is a fantastic library for designing and developing user interactions quickly. Whether it's an image gallery or form, content-revealing CSS animation or an explosion effect, the library provides the core building-blocks to allow you rapid prototyping and to deliver a unique user interface with the minimum of code and effort.

This presents an interesting question, however. Just because you can roll your own solution to any given problem, does that mean you should? Of course not! There's absolutely no need to reinvent the wheel every time you want to create a bit of common functionality; use plugins to instantly add a behaviour. Doing so will save you even more time and effort! Here's our list.

01. Tilted page scroll

Tilted page scroll adds a neat 3D effect to your pages

This plugin from Pete R. is an excellent way to grab people's attention and add a little extra depth to your site. With it installed, items will tilt into view as they scroll up the page, and tilt again as they scroll out of the top of the page. It's a great-looking effect that's nice and easy to implement.

02. Focuspoint

Say goodbye to badly-cropped responsive images

The great thing about responsive web design is being able to create a single page that'll look good on any device. However if your site's automatically cropping images to fit certain viewports, it can often lose the focal point. But with Focuspoint you can make sure your image looks great in any container by specifying a focal point for each image, and the plugin will crop out unwanted parts before the important bits.

03. SVGMagic

SVGMagic creates PNGs to replace SVGs where they are not supported

Using SVG images is a good idea because they will look sharp at any size, and this plugin helps you to do that without having to worry about browsers that don't support them. It searches for SVG images and replaces them with PNG versions if SVG isn't supported. 

04. Face Detection

An easy way to use some powerful technology

Detect and get the coordinates of human faces in images, videos and canvases. 

05. Round Slider

The slider can be themed to suit your purposes

This circular slider enables the user to select a range of values by mousing over the circle. The full slider is the default setup, but you can also use it to get quarter-circle, half-circle and pie shapes. There are CSS styles you can adjust to theme it in various ways, for example, to look like a speedometer. No images are involved; it's all made with CSS and JavaScript. 

06. jInvertScroll

Get a parallax effect with ease

jInvertscroll makes it easy to implement horizontal scrolling with a parallax effect. Roll your scroll wheel on their demo site to whizz along sideways while two layers of landscape move at different speeds to create an illusion of depth. 

07. Slinky

A menu design that won't go out of style?

Slinky is an elegant, timeless menu design that's useful for any scenario in which you've got a lot of sub-menus. Select an item and an animation slides the sub-menu over. There's a demo here.

08. TwentyTwenty

ZURB's plugin helps you compare images

Instead of placing two images side-by-side to show the differences between them, you can use this plugin which places one on top of the other. Users drag a slider so that the bottom image shows through, enabling them to see what has changed in a before-and-after situation.

09. Material design hierarchical display

Animations can help to guide users' attention

Hierarchical display animation effects can be used to guide users' attention and lead them from one point to the next in a process. This animation can be customised to suite your design, and has great documentation to get you going.

10. Tabslet

Minimalist tab design

As the name suggests, Tabslet is a lightweight plugin for making tabs. It supports next/previous controls, rotation, custom events, deep linking and there’s lots of other useful functionality. Have a look at the demo to see if it suits your needs.

Next: more essential jQuery plugins

11. Readable

Set your text just right

Readable helps to make sure your text blocks stay within the optimum parameters for readability; too narrow or too wide makes your paragraphs harder to scan. There’s a great demo that shows you the edits made to running copy in order to make it easier on the eye.

12. nanoGALLERY2

A fully-featured, fast image gallery

nanoGALLERY2 is designed to simplify your image galleries, and offers multi-level navigation in albums, lightbox, combinable hover effects on thumbnails, slideshow, fullscreen, pagination and image lazy load. It is touch-enabled, responsive, fast and it supports cloud storage.

The newly released version 2 offers improved user experience, and new features such as filter by keywords, a shopping cart, social sharing, advanced hover effects, thumbnail display transitions, an info page with google maps location, and more.

13. Tooltipster

Fancy tooltips with Tooltipster

Tooltipster is a modern take on the classic tool-tip, allowing you to present fully HTML-enabled tooltips in semantic markup with CSS used to control the display. There are a wide range of configuration options, making it customisable for any scenario.

14. Magnific Popup

A lightweight, performant lightbox

This is a lightbox plugin for jQuery that focuses on being as lightweight and compatible as possible. The developer has concentrated on performance and user experience, so it doesn't have all the features of alternative lightbox plugins, but it is super-fast and works perfectly across a huge range of devices, including High-DPI (Retina) devices such as the MacBook Pro.

15. jQuery Knob

Touch-friendly dials that also work on the desktop

jQuery Knob takes input elements and converts them into touch-friendly dials that also work on the desktop. This is an excellent example of how you can tailor your content to suit new paradigms, and is worth a look for the technical approach if nothing else.

16. Typeahead.js

Handy auto-complete tool built by Twitter's dev team

The product of Twitter's development team, Type Ahead is an easy-to-implement tool that pulls from a local or external data source as your user types in to an input box, providing auto-complete suggestions as they go.

17. Lettering.js

Get fine control over your type

Lettering.js provides granular control over individual characters in your type, allowing you to apply kerning, colour individual letters, and apply event-listeners. It also plays nicely with FitText, giving you desktop-style control over your typography while remaining responsive.

18. FitText

Automatically scale your text for responsive headlines

This handy plugin allows you to fill your container's width with your type but automatically scaling the text size up or down to suit. Designed to facilitate responsive headlines, the plugin also integrates with Lettering.js to allow for granular per-character styling.

This is an updated version of an article that first appeared on Creative Bloq.

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