What is Scrollytelling?
Also called: Scroll storytelling
The short answer
Scrollytelling is telling a story through scrolling: each scroll step reveals, animates or transforms content, so the page plays like a film the reader controls.
What people say: “a website that tells a story as you scroll”, “Apple-style scrolling”.
Scrollytelling, explained
Sections pin in place while visuals change, text lights up line by line, and scenes swap as the reader moves. Scroll becomes the play button.
It suits products, launches and complex ideas that benefit from pacing. It works best when every scroll step still reads as plain HTML underneath.
Questions people ask about Scrollytelling
What is Scrollytelling?
Scrollytelling is telling a story through scrolling: each scroll step reveals, animates or transforms content, so the page plays like a film the reader controls.
What is an Apple-style website?
People usually mean scrollytelling: large product visuals that rotate, zoom and reveal features as you scroll.
Related terms
Scroll-driven animation ties an animation's progress to scroll position instead of time, so elements animate exactly as far as the reader has scrolled.
Parallax scrollingParallax scrolling moves background and foreground layers at different speeds as you scroll, creating an illusion of depth.
Sticky scrollSticky scroll pins a section in place while the rest of the page keeps scrolling, often while its contents change, like a slideshow driven by scroll.
Micro-interactionsMicro-interactions are small, single-purpose animations that respond to what a visitor does, like a button that presses in, a heart that fills or a field that shakes on an error.
Part of the Web Encyclopedia by Apex Flow Digital. Definitions are general knowledge, kept current, with no invented statistics.