100 underline/overlay animations | The ultimate CSS collection 🥇

#css #beginners #webdev #codepen

Temani Afif Mar 16 ・Updated on Mar 31 ・2 min read

Get tired searching animations for your menu items and links? Search no more! Here is a list of more than 100 different animations. From the simple one to the more complex one, you will for sure find what you want.

No SVG, No JS, No extra tag, No pseudo element, No keyframes ... All of them are done using backgrounds, transition and only one element. Simply add a class and enjoy.

I am not relying on pseudo element so you can easily use them with elements like input (where we cannot have pseudo element).

In order to understand the logic of each animation, I highly recommend my previous article about background-position

All you need to know about background-position

Temani Afif ・ Mar 13 ・ 12 min read

#webdev #tutorial #beginners #css

The Basic

Few notes:

currentColor will use the color defined inside color.
I am using CSS variables to make the code shorter. var(--d, 0) means that the default value is 0 then I change it on hover.
The syntax 0 100% /var(--d, 0) 3px means background-position / background-size. We adjust the 3px to control the height/thickness of the line.

The Continuous

The Double

The Two Steps

The Unexpected

The Rounded

The Fading

The Infinite

Keep the hover for too long here.

The All Sides

The Thick

The Sliding

The below requires us to know the width of the element so it's more suitable for monospace fonts where we can use the ch unit

The Fancy

^{(2) and (5) use some hardcoded values that need to be adjusted based on the element width}

The Inverted

The below doesn't work on Firefox due to a known bug

The 3D

Warning: the below uses some advanced CSS but I considered CSS variables to make it easy to control

That's it!

Tell me what do you think and which one is your favorite. 👇

Discussion (98)

Krishan111 • Mar 17 • Edited

You are really hardworking @afif 👍

Temani Afif • Mar 17

thanks :)

Jacqueline R. Swearingen • Mar 18

Amazing css collection. Thanks!

Temani Afif • Mar 19

you're welcome. Wait for more collection like this ;)

atulit023 • Mar 17

I'm loving it!
There are some people who can use every single animation as a different post for a series actually and then there's this guy.
Great minds

Temani Afif • Mar 17

thanks :) will probably create more posts like this in the future ;)

Jérémie Balagna-Ranin • Mar 24

The Inverted
The below doesn't work on Firefox due to a known bug

Tested just now on Mac OS with Firefox 86.0.1, and it works well ;)

Otherwise, Thanks a lot for the ideas... I just like the inverted :D

Temani Afif • Mar 24

good, probably the bug occur only on Windows OS then.

Mitesh Kamat • Mar 18

That is indeed commendable. So many variations for a single state.

Genevieve Curry • Mar 16

Great job on putting this collection together!

I'm rather partial to The Double and The 3D :)

Conrad Sollitt • Apr 14

Wow incredible job Temani!!

I think I'll try out some of these in apps I'm developing on at work soon! Probably will try or at least consider these for future public facing sites I work on in the future as well.

My favorite are the 3D and Fancy ones at the bottom but I think for basic Db Web Apps I might use "The Basic" or "The All Sides" as I feel they provide just enough visual effects for a user to think "that's nice" but not distract from the site or task at hand.

⚜Dave.rs⚜ • Mar 22

It is really impressive. Could you make youtube tutorials explaining the technique you use to achieve these effects? I would like to learn.

Temani Afif • Mar 22

Will think about this in the future. I never made tutorial videos but would be good to start doing it ;). In the meantime, If you have a question or you need a clarification about a particular effect I can explain you via comment

moaazib123 • Mar 18

Wow
Great work 👏

Démontant • Mar 18

Thanks :D

Phil Léger • Mar 18

Massive, thanks for sharing!

Fred Peres • Mar 18

Wow! Nice work!

yusuf • Mar 18

very nice archive for animations.

D7460N • Mar 18

Thanks for the time and effort you put into this fantastic list!

How do you get the animation to wrap with the link text?

Thanks again!

Temani Afif • Mar 18

well, most of them are not meant to work on wrapped text. I made them for menu item, short link, buttons, etc so only one line ... if you have a specific animation you want to wrap with text I can help you with

D7460N • Mar 19

Thank you! "The Infinite" #2 animation would look nice when wrapping with text IMHO. Thank again!

Temani Afif • Mar 19

here is with wrapping : jsfiddle.net/que6njpo/ .. you simply need to remove the display:inline-block ;)

Renzo Zue • Mar 19

Amazing, i love it

mujeex • Mar 19

Awesome man! Reminded me just how little I know css😅

kuldeepkumar9935 • Mar 19

It's really a great work

Thank you for this eg..

Luis • Mar 19

Thank you! This is great

Martins Gouveia • Mar 19

Very good! Very good and useful. You must have done a lot of work, congratulations.

Daniel Ignatov • Mar 16

Amazing stuff!

CarolMcKay • Apr 20

Hmm, favourite? So many! mix-blend-mode: difference; might be an alternative to the background-clip: text.

Temani Afif • Apr 20

mix-blend-mode won't work because I am using only one element but yes if you consider an extra wrapper for the text then it can work but in such case I would simply use pseudo element to seperate the layers (ex: jsfiddle.net/ov91mjfx/) but I wanted to challenge myself and do all of them with no pseudo element, no keyframes, no extra element, etc ;)

Wilfried Goesgens • Mar 22

we want a Version that can play arkanoid! ;-)
Cool stuff!

Temani Afif • Apr 15

Here you go with another list: dev.to/afif/100-more-underline-ove...

Arkanoid is there! :)

Temani Afif • Mar 22

well, why not. A crazy person like me can come with such crazy idea :) maybe in the next collection, stay tuned ;) [yes there is another collection coming! ]