Transitions for Off-Canvas Navigations

Today we’d like to share another set of transition effects with you. This time we’ll explore transitions for sidebars or off-canvas content like the one we’ve used in the Multi-Level Push Menu. The idea is to show some hidden sidebar with a subtle transition on the element itself and also on the remaining content. Usually the sidebar slides in, pushing the other content to the side. But there are many more possibilities for subtle and fancy effects and today we want to give you some inspiration.

The structure of our demo is very specific because we want to be able to show all effects in one page only. But in general, we need a sidebar element that will be either inside or outside of a push wrapper, depending on whether we want the sidebar to be on top of the push wrapper or under it.
So, either we’ll have

<div id="st-container" class="st-container">

	<!-- content push wrapper -->
	<div class="st-pusher">

		<nav class="st-menu st-effect-1" id="menu-1">
			<!-- sidebar content -->
		</nav>

		<div class="st-content"><!-- this is the wrapper for the content -->
			<div class="st-content-inner"><!-- extra div for emulating position:fixed of the menu -->
				<!-- the content -->
			</div><!-- /st-content-inner -->
		</div><!-- /st-content -->

	</div><!-- /st-pusher -->

</div><!-- /st-container -->

or

<div id="st-container" class="st-container">

	<nav class="st-menu st-effect-1" id="menu-1">
		<!-- sidebar content -->
	</nav>

	<!-- content push wrapper -->
	<div class="st-pusher">

		<div class="st-content"><!-- this is the wrapper for the content -->
			<div class="st-content-inner"><!-- extra div for emulating position:fixed of the menu -->
				<!-- the content -->
			</div><!-- /st-content-inner -->
		</div><!-- /st-content -->

	</div><!-- /st-pusher -->

</div><!-- /st-container -->

An example effect is the following. We add a perspective value to the main container and then we rotate the push wrapper and the menu in 3D:

.st-effect-7.st-container {
	perspective: 1500px;
	perspective-origin: 0% 50%;
}

.st-effect-7 .st-pusher {
	transform-style: preserve-3d;
}

.st-effect-7.st-menu-open .st-pusher {
	transform: translate3d(300px, 0, 0);
}

.st-effect-7.st-menu {
	transform: translate3d(-100%, 0, 0) rotateY(-90deg);
	transform-origin: 100% 50%;
	transform-style: preserve-3d;
}

.st-effect-7.st-menu-open .st-effect-7.st-menu {
	visibility: visible;
	transform: translate3d(-100%, 0, 0) rotateY(0deg);
}

Note that we’re only using visibility here because we have more than one sidebar in our demo. If you just have one sidebar, you won’t have to set the visibility value from hidden to visible.

Some browsers don’t support transitions on pseudo-elements (our overlays), so you might see a quick flicker in those browsers (e.g. some mobile browsers).

IE10 does not support transform-style: preserve-3d which will break nested 3D transformed elements. We use this in a couple of examples, so you won’t be able to see the effect correctly for those ones.

For the demos we are using the beautiful Linicons iconfont by Sergey Shmidt created with the help of the IcoMoon app.

We hope this collection gives you some inspiration for creating some nice effects.

I hope you enjoyed these sidebar transitions and find them inspiring!