Navbar With Bottom Border Animation

This code snippet provides a simple solution for creating a navbar with an eye-catching bottom border animation effect. The navbar comes with a sleek navigation bar that dynamically highlights the active item with a smooth and stylish animation. It allows you to enhance the visual appeal and interactivity of your website’s navigation.

Moreover, you can customize the navbar with additional CSS according to your needs.

How to Create Navbar with Bottom Border Animation

First of all, load the Normalize CSS by adding the following CDN link into the head tag of your HTML document.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/normalize/5.0.0/normalize.min.css">

Create the HTML structure for the navbar and add your links in it as follows:

<nav class="nav">
  <a href="#" class="nav-item is-active" active-color="orange">Home</a>
  <a href="#" class="nav-item" active-color="green">About</a>
  <a href="#" class="nav-item" active-color="blue">Testimonials</a>
  <a href="#" class="nav-item" active-color="red">Blog</a>
  <a href="#" class="nav-item" active-color="rebeccapurple">Contact</a>
  <span class="nav-indicator"></span>
</nav>

Style the navbar using the following CSS styles:

@import url("https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=DM+Sans:500,700&display=swap");
* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}
.cd__main{
   min-height: 450px;
}
body {
  text-align: center;
  display: flex;
  height: 100vh;
  width: 100%;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;
  padding: 0 20px;
  background-image: url("https://www.toptal.com/designers/subtlepatterns/patterns/debut_light.png");
}

.nav {
  display: inline-flex;
  position: relative;
  overflow: hidden;
  max-width: 100%;
  background-color: #fff;
  padding: 0 20px;
  border-radius: 40px;
  box-shadow: 0 10px 40px rgba(159, 162, 177, 0.8);
  height: 60px;
}

.nav-item {
  color: #83818c;
  padding: 20px;
  text-decoration: none;
  transition: 0.3s;
  margin: 0 6px;
  z-index: 1;
  font-family: "DM Sans", sans-serif;
  font-weight: 500;
  position: relative;
}
.nav-item:before {
  content: "";
  position: absolute;
  bottom: -6px;
  left: 0;
  width: 100%;
  height: 5px;
  background-color: #dfe2ea;
  border-radius: 8px 8px 0 0;
  opacity: 0;
  transition: 0.3s;
}

.nav-item:not(.is-active):hover:before {
  opacity: 1;
  bottom: 0;
}

.nav-item:not(.is-active):hover {
  color: #333;
}

.nav-indicator {
  position: absolute;
  left: 0;
  bottom: 0;
  height: 4px;
  transition: 0.4s;
  height: 5px;
  z-index: 1;
  border-radius: 8px 8px 0 0;
}

@media (max-width: 580px) {
  .nav {
    overflow: auto;
  }
}

Finally, add the following JavaScript function to highlight the active menu item.

const indicator = document.querySelector('.nav-indicator');
const items = document.querySelectorAll('.nav-item');

function handleIndicator(el) {
  items.forEach(item => {
    item.classList.remove('is-active');
    item.removeAttribute('style');
  });

  indicator.style.width = `${el.offsetWidth}px`;
  indicator.style.left = `${el.offsetLeft}px`;
  indicator.style.backgroundColor = el.getAttribute('active-color');

  el.classList.add('is-active');
  el.style.color = el.getAttribute('active-color');
}


items.forEach((item, index) => {
  item.addEventListener('click', e => {handleIndicator(e.target);});
  item.classList.contains('is-active') && handleIndicator(item);
});

That’s all! hopefully, you have successfully created a navigation menu with bottom border animation. If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to comment below.