jQuery can pretty much do anything you can think of. All you need is a creative imagination and some time to learn the simple and intuitive API.

In this article, we share with you some innovative uses of jQuery in animating web design elements. You’ll read about some interesting techniques, tutorials, and examples that will show you how to create similar effects on your own websites and web apps.

This example by Dutch web developer Gaya Kessler features an impressive animation effect of cartoonish smoke emanating from factory smoke stacks. Kessler thoughtfully supplies a configurable jQuery plugin with instructions based on his site’s header, so that you may create a similar animation effect for your website.

Sam Dunn of the web development duo, Build Internet, wrote a tutorial on how to create an animated landscape using transparent PNG images. The tutorial takes advantage of the popular jQuery Easing plugin to help with the animation and the setTimeout() JavaScript function to time the events accordingly.

Glimmer, a JavaScript animation creation tool that leverages the jQuery library, has several live demonstrations for some of the things you can do with the app. For instance, with Glimmer, you can create cool animation sequences or make a spiffy and impressive rotating banner for your website.

jQuery Blend is a plugin for animating CSS background images. The project emphasizes on web development best practices such as progressive enhancement  so that users with JavaScript disabled are still able to interact with your interface, albeit without the animation effects, making for a truly universal design.

This animated tutorial goes over a similar concept to the youlove.us example of vertically moving a large CSS background image. Illustrations on how the technique works will help readers grok the concept more fully. Devirtuoso, the author of the tutorial, goes through due diligence by offering an IE6 hack for backwards compatibility.