
Grid to Slider Hero
The Grid to Slider Hero runs a choreographed entrance: a scaled-down grid of images zooms to full size, alternating columns sweep vertically off-screen, and the last remaining image expands to fill the viewport. Headline, caption, category and supporting copy then animate in character by character using SplitText. Thumbnails appear last and switch between slides, cross-fading the background image and re-animating the copy each time. Scrolling past drifts and fades the hero out without pinning, so the rest of the page behaves normally. Slide content lives in a hidden block inside the section in the Designer — one record per image holding the headline words, caption, category and body copy as editable fields. Nothing needs to be changed in custom code to update the copy or add a slide. Key Features Multi-stage entrance: grid zoom, column sweep, image expansion, text reveal Seven slides with independent headline, caption, category and body copy All copy editable in the Designer, not in custom code Thumbnail navigation with keyboard support Character-level text animation via SplitText — free since GSAP 3.13 Scroll parallax that fades the hero out without pinning the page Dynamic viewport height so mobile browser chrome doesn't clip it Full reduced-motion path that lands on the finished state rather than blanking Optional click-to-enter gate, off by default Setup Notes Something must sit below the hero — the parallax needs scroll range, and on a page that can't scroll it would resolve as "fully scrolled" and hide the hero Set the grid images to eager loading; they're all part of the opening animation, so lazy loading causes blank frames Keep headline words short — two long words won't fit on one line at the display size Adding a slide means duplicating a copy record, adding a thumbnail, and adding grid images with a matching data-index


