After seeing this site http://fitzfitzpatrick.com/ I decided to give a try to the "direction-aware hover effect". My first thought was to do it with a pure CSS, not too late I changed my mind and decided to use JS (I need to sleep anyway).
It's kind of simple, using JS we can easily detect the direction the cursor is coming, then, I am using CSS animations for each case (8 in total).
A Pen by Noel Delgado on CodePen.