Re-Creating The Pop-Out Hover Effect With Modern CSS (Part 1) — Smashing Magazine

In a previous article on CSS-Tricks, I demonstrated how to create a fancy hover effect where an avatar pops out of a circle on hover. The challenge was to make such an effect using only the <img> tag.

That was a fun exercise! I relied on a combination of classic styling tricks involving background, outline, and mask to create the effect. This time, I want to pull off something similar while pushing the limits of CSS a little further to create a more complex effect using a few of the newer features that have been released in CSS over the past couple of years — things like shapes made from gradients paired with trigonometric functions and custom properties.

We are going to put those concepts to use to spice up the last demo. Instead of a simple circle, we will have a kind of flower shape that rotates and… well, a demo worth a thousand words:

Cool, right? We have a fancy shape that rotates. On hover, the avatar pops out of the frame, the rotation speeds up, and the shape is slightly modified — all at the same time. And, it’s worth calling out that it’s done with nothing...