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Cover image for 100 underline/overlay animations | The ultimate CSS collection 🥇
Temani Afif
Temani Afif

Posted on • Edited on

100 underline/overlay animations | The ultimate CSS collection 🥇

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


Table of content


The Basic

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. 👇

I am also doing CSS loaders


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Top comments (123)

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madsstoumann profile image
Mads Stoumann

Amazing collection! I used the "Basic 3" on a recent project, but had a CSS validation error, that boiled down to linear-gradient(currentColor 0 0).
Is that a short way of writing linear-gradient(to bottom, currentColor 0 0, currentColor 100% 0)?
And, as to bottom is default, that can be omitted I guess?

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afif profile image
Temani Afif

It's the short way of writing linear-gradient(currentColor,currentColor). The direction and the color stops aren't important since a gradient between two same colors will always give that color. I am defining two colors stop for it (0 and 0) to write the color only once inside the gradient.
The syntax I am using is a bit uncommon but it's valid. The CSS validator is never up to date anyway.
I wrote a recent article about this if you want: css-tricks.com/cool-hover-effects-...

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madsstoumann profile image
Mads Stoumann

Cool, didn’t know that syntax!

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krishan111 profile image
Krishan111 • Edited

You are really hardworking @afif 👍

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afif profile image
Temani Afif

thanks :)

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jamesqquick profile image
James Q Quick

This is incredible!

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mjcoder_5 profile image
MJCoder

Awesome collection - bookmarked! I am sure I'll be using this!

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kievandres profile image
Kiev Andres

Awesome! 🔥

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conradsollitt profile image
Conrad Sollitt

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.

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afif profile image
Temani Afif

I have released more collections if you are intrested :) dev.to/afif/series/12016

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conradsollitt profile image
Conrad Sollitt

Great job! These are awesome, your CSS skills and design are incredible!

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genevievecurry profile image
Genevieve Curry

Great job on putting this collection together!

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

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afif profile image
Temani Afif

I have released more collections if you are intrested :) dev.to/afif/series/12016

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icecoffee profile image
Atulit Anand

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

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afif profile image
Temani Afif

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

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jbalagnaranin profile image
Jérémie Balagna-Ranin
The Inverted
The below doesn't work on Firefox due to a known bug
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

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

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afif profile image
Temani Afif

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

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dav3rs profile image
⚜Dave.rs⚜

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

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afif profile image
Temani Afif

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

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afif profile image
Temani Afif

I have released more collections if you are intrested :) dev.to/afif/series/12016