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We often think of background images as texture or something that provides contrast for legible content — in other words, not really content. If it was content, you’d probably reach for an <img> anyway, accessibility and whatnot.

But there are …

I like that sorta effect where an image almost looks like it’s an oil painting or an illustration made with a thick, runny ink fountain pen. I got the idea when Scott Vandehey shared his “halftone filter” effect on the …

Our dear friend Robin has a new essay called In Praise of Shadows. Now, before you hop over there looking for nuggets on CSS box shadows, text shadows, and shadow filters… this is not that. It’s an essay …

I was working on a client project a few days ago and wanted to create a certain effect on an <img>. See, background images can do the effect I was looking for somewhat easily with background-attachment: fixed;. With …

I was reading Jake’s “Cross-fading any two DOM elements is currently impossible” which is a wonderfully nerdy deep dive into how there is no real way to literally cross-fade elements. Yeah, you can animate both of their opacities, but even …

You can make a typical CSS border dashed or dotted. For example:

.box {
   border: 1px dashed black;
   border: 3px dotted red;
}

You don’t have all that much control over how big or long the dashes or gaps are. …

There’s a design trend I’ve seen popping up all over the place. Maybe you’ve seen it too. It’s this sort of thing where text is repeated over and over. A good example is the price comparison website, GoCompare, who used …

One of my favorite ways of adding icons to a site is by including them as data URL background images to pseudo-elements (e.g. ::after) in my CSS. This technique offers several advantages:

• They don’t require any additional HTTP requests

One cool thing about CSS custom properties is that they can be a part of a value. Let’s say you’re using multiple backgrounds to pull off a design. Each background will have its own color, image, repeat, position, etc. It …

With CSS, you can control the background of elements. You can set a background-color to fill it with a solid color, a background-image to fill it with (you guessed it) an image, or even both:

body {
  background-color: red;
  background-image: 

Something you very much want to avoid in web design is unreadable text. That can happen when the background color of an element is too close or exactly the color of the text. For instance:

.header {
  background-color: white;