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Today we’d like to share some experimental and creative link effects with you. The idea is to use pseudo-elements and animate them to create a subtle and modern effect. In the examples we are using hover transitions, but you could also imagine these effects on click or as an initial animation.

In most cases the HTML is simply a nav with some anchors:

<nav class="cl-effect-13">
	<a href="#">Beleaguer</a>
	<a href="#">Lassitude</a>
	<a href="#">Murmurous</a>
	<a href="#">Palimpsest</a>
	<a href="#">Assemblage</a>
</nav>

But for some special effects we might use a data attribute for repeating the link text in the pseudo-element:

<nav class="cl-effect-11">
	<a href="#" data-hover="Desultory">Desultory</a>
	<a href="#" data-hover="Sumptuous">Sumptuous</a>
	<a href="#" data-hover="Scintilla">Scintilla</a>
	<a href="#" data-hover="Propinquity">Propinquity</a>
	<a href="#" data-hover="Harbinger">Harbinger</a>
</nav>

We might also use a span in some cases because we want to add perspective to each item or achieve another effect.

<nav class="cl-effect-10">
	<a href="#" data-hover="Seraglio"><span>Seraglio</span></a>
	<a href="#" data-hover="Sumptuous"><span>Sumptuous</span></a>
	<a href="#" data-hover="Scintilla"><span>Scintilla</span></a>
	<a href="#" data-hover="Palimpsest"><span>Palimpsest</span></a>
	<a href="#" data-hover="Assemblage"><span>Assemblage</span></a>
</nav>

An example for an effect is the following style. It positions a pseudo-element on top of the actual link text and on hover, we’ll make the pseudo-element disappear by scaling it down and making it fade out (structure as in the second html block):

/* Effect 15: scale down, reveal */
.cl-effect-15 a {
	color: rgba(0,0,0,0.2);
	font-weight: 700;
	text-shadow: none;
}

.cl-effect-15 a::before {
	color: #fff;
	content: attr(data-hover);
	position: absolute;
	transition: transform 0.3s, opacity 0.3s;
}

.cl-effect-15 a:hover::before,
.cl-effect-15 a:focus::before {
	transform: scale(0.9);
	opacity: 0;
}

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

Please note that IE10 doesn’t support transform-style: preserve-3d, a property that is used in some of the examples. Since we can’t test for it yet using Modernizr you can try to use one of the suggested solutions for detecting IE10.

I hope you enjoyed these link effects and find them inspiring!