Firefox Marketplace Animated Buttons

By  on  

The Firefox Marketplace is an incredibly attractive, easy to use hub that promises to make finding and promoting awesome HTML5-powered web applications easy and convenient. While I don't work directly on the Marketplace, I am privy to the codebase (and so are you). One of the well written and elegant touches to the site is its animated button. They are comprised completely of CSS and achieve a great effect by animating box-shadow and line-height.

The HTML

These styles can be applied to A elements with the button class or actual BUTTON elements:

<a href="#" class="button" role="button">Arsenal Arsenal Arsenal</a>

Since BUTTON elements have had styling quirks in the past, you'll want to use A elements everywhere outside of forms.

The CSS

There's a lot of CSS in the basic element state, but I kept all of it to keep my demo true to the Marketplace button. Here's the magic:

a.button:link,
a.button:visited,
button,
input[type=submit],
input[type=button] {
	border: 0;
	color: white;
	display: inline-block;
	font: 600 16px/31px "Open Sans","Helvetica Neue",Arial,sans-serif;
	height: 32px;
	background-color: 
	#267CC2;
	padding: 0 24px;
	position: relative;
	text-align: center;
	text-decoration: none;
	text-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, .25);
	white-space: nowrap;
	border-radius: .5em;
	box-shadow: 0 2px 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, .2), inset 0 -1px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, .2), inset 0 1px 0 0 rgba(255, 255, 255, .2);
	background-color: #267CC2;
	background-image: linear-gradient(#42A5E1, #267CC2);
	transition-property: -moz-box-shadow,-webkit-box-shadow,box-shadow,line-height;
	transition-duration: .2s,.2s,.2s,.2s;
}

a.button:hover,
a.button:focus,
button:hover,
button:focus,
input[type=submit]:hover,
input[type=button]:hover,
input[type=submit]:focus,
input[type=button]:focus {
    box-shadow: 0 4px 1px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2), 0 -3px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.2) inset;
	line-height: 28px;
	text-decoration: none;
}

a.button:active, button.button:active {
    box-shadow: inset 0 2px 0 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, .2), inset 0 12px 24px 6px rgba(0, 0, 0, .2), inset 0 0 2px 2px rgba(0, 0, 0, .2);
	transition-duration: .1s,.1s,.1s,.1s;
	line-height: 34px;
}

As you can probably guess, the original CSS was generated using a preprocessor (LESS, in this case). As with any piece of expertly written code, there isn't too much to explain. The animated transition is applied to box-shadow and line-height properties and the :active and :hover states trigger the animations.

I love what the AMO and Marketplace team has done with this subtle effect. Not only is the effect smooth and unique, it requires no JavaScript and uses what have now become standard effect techniques. Love it!

Recent Features

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Highlight Table Rows, Columns, and Cells Using MooTools 1.2.3

    Row highlighting and individual cell highlighting in tables is pretty simple in every browser that supports :hover on all elements (basically everything except IE6). Column highlighting is a bit more difficult. Luckily MooTools 1.2.3 makes the process easy. The XHTML A normal table. The cells...

  • By
    CSS Vertical Centering

    Front-end developing is beautiful, and it's getting prettier by the day. Nowadays we got so many concepts, methodologies, good practices and whatnot to make our work stand out from the rest. Javascript (along with its countless third party libraries) and CSS have grown so big, helping...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!