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The Best Responsive Menu Tutorials on Tuts+

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Interested in building a responsive menu for your next project, but need some inspiration? Whether you’re looking for a mega menu, a dashboard menu, an off-canvas menu, or a menu that will adapt nicely to different screen sizes, you’re in the perfect place; today we’ll explore the best CSS and JavaScript header menu tutorials that are available on Tuts+.

For all demos, check them at different screen sizes to see how the layout changes—these embedded versions show at a maximum of 850px wide, which is usually too narrow to see the “desktop” menu variant.

1. Responsive Mega Menus

Many website designs require a different header layout for desktop and mobile screens. For example, you may need a mega menu on desktop screens and an off-canvas menu on mobile screens.

In this tutorial, we explore how to accomplish this scenario by using UIkit, a worth-seeing front-end framework that we’ve covered a lot in the past.

Actually, this is one of my favorite exercises as it describes perfectly why you might want to use a front-end framework and take advantage of its built-in features depending on your layout needs.

Here’s the first variation of our header menu:

And the second one:

From here, you can go even deeper and make the menus dynamic (I still owe you a tutorial about converting one of the menus to a dynamic one through WordPress!) 

2. Multilevel Animated Mobile Menu

Are you in need of a multi-level sliding mobile menu, but you don’t want to use a JavaScript library? No problem, there’s a tutorial available just for this case. 

Here’s our three-level deep menu:

Nothing stops you from making this menu dynamic. I’ve followed the same technique many times to make similar menus dynamic on the WordPress sites I’ve been working on! 

Additionally, if you need to support an old site that uses a legacy version of jQuery and need a quick solution for a multi-level off-canvas menu, I have you covered. Examine the following sliding menu that takes advantage of an older version of mmenu.js.

3. Advanced Responsive Menu

Inspired by the Netflix Jobs website, this tutorial covers the creation of an advanced responsive menu that leads into an off-canvas menu with staggering animations on mobile screens. As a bonus, we also take care of the search UI to make it ready for use.

4. Responsive Navigation Bar

Continuing our journey, here’s a tutorial from Anna Monus that thoroughly describes the steps for creating a mobile-first, responsive navigation bar with flexbox.

And if you’re someone who prefers seeing the menu creation from the foundations, there’s a complete video version of this tutorial by Adi Purdila.

FREE
31 Minutes

Responsive Navigation Bar with Flexbox

In this video tutorial, we’ll use flexbox to create a mobile-first, responsive, toggleable navigation bar with different layouts for mobile, tablet, and desktop screens. 

    5. Animated Off-Canvas Menu

    This tutorial will teach you how to create another responsive off-canvas navigation menu. Here the off-canvas lives between the fixed menu and the banner overlay and appears with a slide-in animation.

    Lots of creative variations for this effect, especially if you consider including some styles for graphic effects like blend modes.

    6. Dashboard Menu

    Moving on, this time we’re building a responsive sidebar dashboard menu. Our menu is flexible enough to support a dark/light dashboard mode, where the selected one persists on page load thanks to local storage.

    Check out the demo (which has been viewed over 30k times!) and give it some ❤️!

    7. Menu With Preserve State on Page Load

    Let’s now go a bit further than just the creation of a responsive menu and examine a specific request.

    This static site built with TailWind CSS goes through the creation of a minimal responsive menu and emphasizes how to preserve its active state on page load.

    Let’s explain. The first time we visit the site, the menu will be hidden. However, as soon as we open it and close the browser, the menu will remain open until we close it again. Again here we’re taking advantage of local storage.

    8. Scrolling-Based Menus

    Nothing stops us from building scroll-based animated responsive menus.

    Be sure to check out all the demos on this list, and especially observe the following one and its transformations depending on the screen size.

    Conclusion

    This list should have given you enough inspiration to build your own responsive menus! Enjoy the demos, read the associated tutorials, and last but not least, be sure to follow Envato Tuts+ on CodePen for more creative pens!

    As always, thanks a lot for reading!

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