This simple effect reminds me of the hey day of horrible animated GIF files, entertaining nonetheless and pretty awesome that this kind of effect can be done without using images.

Aside: David DeSandro is awesome. His jQuery Masonry plugin has saved me so many times when I've been tasked to build a horizontal site.

You'll love this horrible abuse of CSS3 and HTML5 I dreamed up with my friend, then:

http://orangestar.cats4gold.net/drogz/

Why yes, that is an instrumental MIDI converted to MP3 and OGG.

Oh I see... FYI: Click on the background somewhere near text. I was clicking on links and you dont get the 'smush' effect unless you click on the background....and hovering over links gives a rainbow colored effect.

I guess its cool.... but no, not really.

Nice hack (especially when you're clicking around), but what caught my eye was that maybe for the first time, Safari is actually waaay faster than Chrome or Firefox.

This is (roughly) the framerate I got when I tried it on the these three browsers (all latest versions, Windows Vista):

    Safari: 60 fps (or 30, or whatever "completely smooth" means)
    Chrome: 20 fps (compared to Safari)
    Firefox: 30 fps (compared to Safari)

But why? Chrome has always been the fastest (on Windows - on Mac, Safari is somewhat smoother for me)???

From what I can tell, requestAnimationFrame in Chrome runs at a slower frame rate. I've had a similar experience with a plugin i'm writing. Maybe I was doing something wrong but requestAnimationFrame was firing once for every ~10 actual frames in Chrome.

Do you have chrome://flags -> "GPU compositing on all pages" set to enabled?

No, it was "Default".

I enabled it and... much to my surprise, the frame rate dropped significantly. It's now like 3 (three) frames per second (it's so slow I am able to actually count the frames!)

The "hover" animation (rainbow thing) is fine, 100% smooth. But the exploding animation is just ridiculously slow.

Then I set it to be disabled and the frame rate improved a little.

    Default: 20 fps
    GPU composition DISABLED: 10 fps
    GPU composition ENABLED: 3 fps

The machine I'm testing with is not particularly powerful, maybe that's the problem. 2 or 3 GBs of RAM, nVidia 9400 (or something like that).

A bit sad if that's “not particularly powerful” for animating a few letters on a freaking web page ... :-)

A great piece of engineering, but I have to say... just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

I hate too much negativity, though, so I'll repeat my, "Well done."

Go to the very bottom and click "What's the email?". That effect is awesome!

hover? seriously? Didn't mouseovers become a big design no-no, now that tablets are in and PCs are out? I hope I remember to check this later when I'm on my laptop.

ps. I love desandro's isotope library

The "big no-no" is having important information that is only displayed on hover, not hover effects in themselves.

That's hideous.

I thought that too when I hovered, but clicking is much more fun. You can get a nice swing happening.

The examples at http://desandro.github.com/3dtransforms/ are great.

Kinda reminds me of my old flash text effects. http://0.s3.envato.com/files/42885/preview.swf (second and forth one)

This is awesome, too: http://metafizzy.co/ (also from David DeSandro)

Hover over the logo and watch how the colors on the page change

Reminds me of the bright colours of geocities days

click/click and drag on anything but the links.