Icon Fonts in Use with a Fancy Hover Effect

In this tutorial we will play a bit with icon fonts. Besides other advantages, this technique provides an easy way to have your icons look crisp on retina displays.
We’ll use a custom set of social icons generated with IcoMoon App and we will add a fancy effect on hover.

Step 1 Quick Visit to IcoMoon App

For the purpose of this tutorial we select 6 social networks icons : dribbble, facebook, twitter, pinterest, tumblr, flickr, google plus and github. What follows is as easy as clicking “Font” and “Download”. Our custom font icons set is ready to use.

The IcoMoon download folder contains a style.css file that will use as a base. Here’s what we’ll start with:

@font-face {
	font-family: 'icomoon';
	src:url('fonts/icomoon.eot');
	src:url('fonts/icomoon.eot?#iefix') format('embedded-opentype'),
		url('fonts/icomoon.woff') format('woff'),
		url('fonts/icomoon.ttf') format('truetype'),
		url('fonts/icomoon.svg#icomoon') format('svg');
	font-weight: normal;
	font-style: normal;
}

.icon-dribbble:before, .icon-twitter:before, .... {
	font-family: 'icomoon';
	speak: none;
	font-style: normal;
	font-weight: normal;
	line-height: 1;
	-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
}
.icon-dribbble:before {
	content: "\e00a";
}
.icon-twitter:before {
	content: "\e00b";
}
....

Step 2 HTML

Let’s look at the markup

<ul class="social">
  <li><a href="#" aria-hidden="true" class="icon-dribbble"></a></li>
  <li><a href="#" aria-hidden="true" class="icon-twitter"></a></li>
  <li><a href="#" aria-hidden="true" class="icon-facebook"></a></li>
  <li><a href="#" aria-hidden="true" class="icon-pinterest"></a></li>
  <li><a href="#" aria-hidden="true" class="icon-flickr"></a></li>
  <li><a href="#" aria-hidden="true" class="icon-google-plus"></a></li>
  <li><a href="#" aria-hidden="true" class="icon-tumblr"></a></li>
  <li><a href="#" aria-hidden="true" class="icon-github"></a></li>
</ul>

The aria-hidden state indicates whether an element is visible or not, we use it to tell the screen reader that an element is not visible to assistive technology.

Step 3 Hover Effect – the idea

The idea is to create a kind of a movement effect on hover. We’ll have the “li” elements with overflow set to hidden, and the “a” elements being twice as high. With the a:after pseudo-elements we duplicate the icon. What happens on hover is : “li” changes its background color, the “a” element shifts up half its height (see the image below). Both changes with a subtle transition.

Step 4 Additional Font Icons styles

What we have to do is to duplicate the icon-*:before styles for icon-*:after :

.icon-dribbble:before, .icon-twitter:before, ..., .icon-github:before,
.icon-dribbble:after, .icon-twitter:after, ..., .icon-github:after {
  font-family: 'icomoon';
  speak: none;
  font-style: normal;
  font-weight: normal;
  line-height: 1;
  -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; }

.icon-dribbble:before, .icon-dribbble:after {
  content: "\e00a"; }

.icon-twitter:before, .icon-twitter:after {
  content: "\e00b"; }
...

Step 5 CSS continued

Note that, for the simplicity, I don’t use the vendor prefixes for transition.

ul.social {
  text-align: center; }
  ul.social li {
    display: inline-block;
    width: 60px;
    height: 60px;
    overflow: hidden;
    line-height: 60px;
    background: #404040;
    /* --- optional, it looks nice also with simple squares --- */
    border-radius: 100%;
    transition-duration: 0.7s; }
    /* --- hover effect : background color change --- */ 
    ul.social li:hover {
      background: #33cc99;
      box-shadow: inset 0 0 20px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.3); }
    ul.social li a {
      display: block;
      width: 100%;
      height: 200%;
      position: relative;
      top: 0;
      color: #33cc99;
      transition: top 0.7s; }
       /* --- hover effect : shift up --- */ 
      ul.social li:hover a {
        top: -60px; }
      ul.social li a:after {
        position: absolute;
        width: inherit;
        height: 50%;
        left: 0;
        bottom: 0;
        color: #404040;
        line-height: 60px;
        text-align: center; }

And that’s all. I hope you’ve found this tutorial useful, looking forward to your comments. Thanks.

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