Tagged “transform”

Let’s create a pure CSS effect that changes the color of a text link on hover – but slide that new color in instead of simply swapping colors.

Katherines post explores four different techniques to achieve the effect, and their comparative pros and cons with regard to accessibility, performance, and browser support.

Technique 4, which uses a CSS transform seems to be the most flexible, best-performing and has best cross-browser support, however because it requires adding a semantically redundant <span> into the anchor I would use it sparingly rather than on all links by default.

Thanks to a great tip from Lucas Hugdahl on Twitter, here’s how to use CSS custom properties (variables) in your transforms so you don't need to rewrite the whole transform rule in order to transition (animate) a single property.

Let’s take the simple example of a button that we want to increase in size when hovered.

By using a custom property for the scale value, we can keep things DRYer in our :hover rule by only updating that variable rather than rewriting the entire transform rule.

The button HTML:

<button>Hover over me</button>

CSS:

button {
  transition: transform .5s ease-in-out;
  transform: translateX(-50%) translateY(-50%) scale(var(--scale, 1));
}

button:hover {
  --scale: 2;
}

See it in action on Codepen.

Here’s a nice CSS-only hover technique from Trys Mudford incorporating scale transforms, opacity transitions and mouse pointer events.