20 CSS Link Hover Effect Designs
Squiggly Underline
Hand-drawn-look squiggly SVG underline that draws in beneath the link on hover via stroke-dasharray. Perfect for navigation, blog headers, and personality-forward sites.
Squiggly Underline the 1st 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
<nav class="cle-squig-nav"> <a href="#" class="cle-squig">home</a> <a href="#" class="cle-squig is-active">blog</a> <a href="#" class="cle-squig">work</a> <a href="#" class="cle-squig">about</a> </nav>
.cle-squig-nav {
display: flex;
gap: 28px;
}
.cle-squig {
position: relative;
padding-bottom: 14px;
color: #c5e8ff;
font:
600 18px/1.2 "Caveat",
"Comic Sans MS",
cursive;
text-decoration: none;
transition: color 0.25s;
}
.cle-squig.is-active {
color: #ddff8a;
}
.cle-squig::after {
content: "";
position: absolute;
left: -2px;
right: -2px;
bottom: 0;
height: 10px;
background-image: url("data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2000/svg' viewBox='0 0 80 10' preserveAspectRatio='none'><path d='M2 5 Q 12 0 22 5 T 42 5 T 62 5 T 78 5' stroke='%23ddff8a' stroke-width='2' fill='none' stroke-linecap='round'/></svg>");
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-size: 0% 100%;
background-position: left center;
transition: background-size 0.55s cubic-bezier(0.65, 0, 0.35, 1);
}
.cle-squig:hover::after,
.cle-squig:focus-visible::after,
.cle-squig.is-active::after {
background-size: 100% 100%;
}