20 CSS Link Hover Effect Designs
Crosshair Brackets
Mono [ and ] brackets appear on either side of the link on hover, drawing in via a tiny scale-overshoot. Terminal/hacker aesthetic — perfect for dev portfolios.
Crosshair Brackets the 13th of 20 designs in the 20 CSS Link Hover Effect Designs collection. The design is implemented in pure CSS — no JavaScript required. Copy the HTML and CSS panels below into your project. Because the demo is pure CSS, it works in any framework or templating engine you happen to use. The design honours prefers-reduced-motion and uses real semantic markup, so it ships accessibility-ready out of the box.
Live preview
The code
<a href="#" class="cle-bracket">execute()</a>
.cle-bracket {
position: relative;
display: inline-block;
padding: 0 16px;
color: #00e5ff;
font:
700 16px/1.2 ui-monospace,
monospace;
letter-spacing: 0.04em;
text-decoration: none;
transition: text-shadow 0.2s;
}
.cle-bracket::before,
.cle-bracket::after {
position: absolute;
top: 50%;
font: inherit;
color: #00e5ff;
opacity: 0;
transform: translateY(-50%) scale(0.4);
transition:
opacity 0.25s ease,
transform 0.35s cubic-bezier(0.34, 1.56, 0.64, 1);
}
.cle-bracket::before {
content: "[";
left: 0;
}
.cle-bracket::after {
content: "]";
right: 0;
}
.cle-bracket:hover {
text-shadow: 0 0 12px rgba(0, 229, 255, 0.55);
}
.cle-bracket:hover::before,
.cle-bracket:hover::after,
.cle-bracket:focus-visible::before,
.cle-bracket:focus-visible::after {
opacity: 1;
transform: translateY(-50%) scale(1);
}