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Simple Icon Hover Effects

A set of simple round icon hover effects with CSS transitions and animations for your inspiration.

IconHoverEffects

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Today we want to share some simple icon hover effects with you. The idea is to create a subtle and stylish effect using CSS transitions and animations on the anchors and their pseudo-elements. For the icons we are using an icon font (Eco Ico by Matthew Skiles, created with the IcoMoon app) which we add using the :before pseudo-class.

Please note: this only works as intended in browsers that support the respective CSS properties.

The markup only uses an anchor for the icon and we wrap a set into a container so that we can create a variety of effects:

<div class="hi-icon-wrap hi-icon-effect-1 hi-icon-effect-1a">
	<a href="#" class="hi-icon hi-icon-mobile">Mobile</a>
	<a href="#" class="hi-icon hi-icon-screen">Desktop</a>
	<a href="#" class="hi-icon hi-icon-earth">Partners</a>
	<a href="#" class="hi-icon hi-icon-support">Support</a>
	<a href="#" class="hi-icon hi-icon-locked">Security</a>
</div>

An example for a hover effect is the simple rotation of the pseudo-element for the icon:

.hi-icon-effect-6 .hi-icon {
	box-shadow: 0 0 0 4px rgba(255,255,255,1);
	transition: background 0.2s, color 0.2s;	
}

.no-touch .hi-icon-effect-6 .hi-icon:hover {
	background: rgba(255,255,255,1);
	color: #64bb5d;
}

.no-touch .hi-icon-effect-6 .hi-icon:hover:before {
	animation: spinAround 2s linear infinite;
}

@keyframes spinAround {
	from {
		transform: rotate(0deg)
	}
	to {
		transform: rotate(360deg);
	}
}

Note that a dashed border on a round pseudo-element (border-radius: 50%) does not work in FF 21.0 (effect 4)

I hope you enjoy the effects and find them inspiring!

Find this project on Github

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ML is a freelance web designer and developer with a passion for interaction design. She studied Cognitive Science and Computational Logic and has a weakness for the smell of freshly ground peppercorns.

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Website: http://www.codrops.com

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  1. 1

    hi Mary, I hope this comment is reaching you. I would like to combine this icon efefct with the dots on your other script “Fullscreen Slit Slider” (the one with animals icons). In that script, I would like to substitute the dots with the animal icons, and have the hover effect indicated on this script. Can you plkease help?

  2. 2

    Hi Mary
    thank you very much for your tutorials. Always so impressive !!
    Do you think that your effects would be available with fontawesome icons ? and if yes, how-to do it ? I am stuck on it.

    Thanks again.
    Olivier

  4. 4

    The effects don’t work in Firefox 29.0a1 (2014-01-19). I also don’t see the navigation buttons at the top (1 2 3 … 9).

  5. 5

    Hi

    I was wondering, is it possible to use your own icons and create these effects, or can you only use the icons provided by the font?

  7. 7

    Why not?

    a {width: 100px; height: 100px; display: block; background: #ccc; border-radius: 50%; transition: all 0.2s linear;}
    a:hover {background: #000; transition: all 0.2s linear; box-shadow: 0 0 0 5px #fff, 0 0 0 10px #000;}


    <a href="/"></a>

    • 8

      Hi Lashchevsky, yes that effect works but for some reason when I view the demo in the current versions of Firefox, Chrome and Opera very few of the effects on the demo work, almost none.

  8. 9

    Great Tips and tricks. Thanks for the awesome effective buttons idea 😉

  9. 10

    The spin around effect can be done without keyframe animations by simply using transformation and transformation-ease property:

    img.myicon{
    vertical-align: middle;
    }

    a:hover img.myicon{

    transform:rotate(36000deg);
    -webkit-transform:rotate(36000deg);
    transition: all 15s ease;
    -webkit-transition: all 015s ease;
    -moz-transition: all 15s ease;
    -o-transition: all 15s ease;
    background:#ff6600;
    border-radius:15px;

    }

  10. 11

    My previous comment would give a very fast spinning icon for a longer period of time but for general use the code would look something like:


    a:hover img.myicon{
    transition: all 30s ease;
    transform:rotate(2000deg);
    -webkit-transform:rotate(2000deg);

    }


    Though it will be not infinite, the ease in / ease out effect doesn’t look bad either and also the code is very simple to remember.
    I don’t know if we can use simple transformation for a certain element for a given duration without using the ease property.

  17. 20

    Why does the a:link’s in the nav show on only one of my computers? The one that doesnt show them has a bigger screen, but i can figure out why it only shows on the smaller screen. Anyone know?

Comments are closed.