Creating Smooth Hover Effects for Menu Icons

It’s been a while since I worked with stylesheets. I have always been a software developer focused mostly on backend functionality. Recently, however, I started using the Bear blogging platform for my personal website, which allows you to customize its built-in themes.

The menu of my website is a collection of icons that link to different pages. For example, ✍️ points to a page with an overview of all my blog posts. My goal for this and other menu icons was to animate them on hover, so they scale up.

A Simple Solution

In its basic form, the HTML of the menu looks like this:

Of course, I could do something simple (and probably not very professional) in CSS like this:

nav a {
  text-decoration: none;
}

nav a:hover {
  font-size: 1.5em;
}

See this example in action

This works, but it’s far from ideal:

• There is no animated transition; a menu item immediately grows in size on hover and shrinks back on unhover.
• Surrounding menu items move around on hover.

Working with Transitions

A better way to create good-looking animations for your menu is by using transition. With a transition, you can define which properties of an element will be animated. This transition property is placed on the main element (not on the :hover selector). Then, on the :hover selector, you can use the transform property to define the type of animation on hover.

In my case, the stylesheet looks like this:

nav a {
  display: inline-block;
  text-decoration: none;
  transition: transform .3s ease-in-out;
}

nav a:hover {
  transform: scale(1.5);
}

I’ll explain each part below:

• The transition animation only works for block elements, not for inline elements. So, I need to ensure that the CSS handles my a tags as blocks with display: inline-block.
• transition: transform .3s ease-in-out means that a transition is applied to the transform property, the animation takes .3 seconds, and the animation is triggered both on hover and unhover.
• transform: scale(1.5) defines the type of transition. In this case, it scales my menu icons by a factor of 1.5.

The final result is shown in this example.

For more options and transformation effects, check out the documentation for the transition property and the transform property.