The mystery of the rotating sidebar

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 at 11:41 am

Every since I played around with the sidebar here on the blog giving it a slight tilt in 3D I get a lot of questions how it was done. Well, there is no dark magic at play, just some 3D CSS transformations and a transition.

So I recorded a quick screencast showing you how it is done (also showing some of the Firefox devtools). You can see it on YouTube or in higher quality on vid.ly.

The code is very simple:

<div class="yui-b" id="sb">
  <div id="rot">
    ...
  </div>
</div>

#sb {
  position: relative;
  -webkit-perspective: 800px;
     -moz-perspective: 800px;
      -ms-perspective: 800px;
       -o-perspective: 800px;
          perspective: 800px;
}
#rot {
  -webkit-transform: rotateY(-15deg);
     -moz-transform: rotateY(-15deg);
      -ms-transform: rotateY(-15deg);
       -o-transform: rotateY(-15deg);
          transform: rotateY(-15deg);
  -webkit-transition: -webkit-transform 1s;
     -moz-transition: -moz-transform 1s;
      -ms-transition: -ms-transform 1s;
       -o-transition: -o-transform 1s;
          transition: transform 1s;
}
#rot:hover {
  -webkit-transform: rotateY(0deg);
     -moz-transform: rotateY(0deg);
      -ms-transform: rotateY(0deg);
       -o-transform: rotateY(0deg);
          transform: rotateY(0deg);
}

You can play with 3D transforms using the 3D CSS Tester and don’t forget that this month’s Mozilla Dev Derby is about 3D transforms.

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The mystery of the rotating sidebar

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