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

All you need to know about background-position

Temani Afif Mar 13 12 min read

#webdev #tutorial #beginners #css

Table of content

• The Basic
• The Continuous
• The Double
• The Two Steps
• The Unexpected
• The Rounded
• The Fading
• The Infinite
• The All Sides
• The Thick
• The Sliding
• The Fancy
• The Inverted
• The 3D

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.