Cover Flow

In this Example, you’ll learn to use the Page tool to create a list of pages that transition using the Cover Flow effect.

Learn more about cover flow effects

The Cover Flow is an interaction pattern designed for visual browsing, such as through a list of icons, images, or album covers. It was originally developed by Andrew Coulter Enright, who wrote about the concept in 2004.

Like paper cards flipping within a bar jukebox, I pictured each cover flipping in and out of the illuminated center position, revealing the subsequent album/song as the user browsed through the current library (via the linear scroll-bar detailed below). The faster you scrolled, the faster the covers would shuffle in and out of the spotlight.

Enright would go on to collaborate with Jonathan del Strother to produced a demo application named CoverFlow in 2005. The technology was soon purchased by Apple, Inc. and quickly became a staple of Apple’s iTunes and Finder interfaces.

While Apple retired the pattern from their products in 2018, the “cover flow effect” is well-established for interactions where a user is paging through a list of items that either are images themselves, such as a photo gallery, or where the item may be meaningfully replaced by its image. Or, as Enright originally wrote, where item’s image is “a true signifier as opposed to a decoration”, such as in the case of album artwork.

How to create a cover flow effect in Framer

The pattern works best when it presents the current item while also implying the presence of other items in the list, which remain partially angled away from the viewer. In most cases, presenting neighboring items in this way removes the need for page indicators.

As shown in the Example, you can achieved this effect in Framer by leaving space between the Page component’s edges and the edges of the device frame, then setting the component’s Overflow property to Show.