How to Build a Color Wheel with Tints & Shades

I've built a handful of color pickers through the years, so when I in this book stumbled upon a color-wheel with “built-in” shades and tints, I had to code it:

At first, I thought: “That's easy – it's just a conical gradient with hard stops for the colors, and a radial gradient for the tints and shades”.

But, alas, look at how “un-crisp” the edges in the conical gradient are (Chrome, MacOS):

So – I had to do it in <svg>.

Each “ring” in the circle is built up by 12 circles with different colors and stroke-dasharray:

<g id="wheel">
  <circle class="c3" cx="16" cy="16" r="16"></circle>
  <circle class="c2" cx="16" cy="16" r="16"></circle>
  <circle class="c1" cx="16" cy="16" r="16"></circle>
...etc

And the CSS:

--u: calc(100 / 12);

.c1 {
  stroke: hsl(0, var(--s), var(--l));
  stroke-dasharray: var(--u) 100;
}
.c2 {
  stroke: hsl(30, var(--s), var(--l));
  stroke-dasharray: calc(2 * var(--u)) 100;
}
.c3 {
  stroke: hsl(60, var(--s), var(--l));
  stroke-dasharray: calc(3 * var(--u)) 100;
}
/* ... etc */

The circles are wrapped in a <g>-tag with id="wheel", so I can use <use> (pun intended) to clone the rings:

<use href="#wheel" class="r3" />
<use href="#wheel" class="r2" />
<use href="#wheel" class="r1" />
etc...

Each ring-class then sets a different --l (lightness) and stroke-width:

.r1 {
  --l: 40%;
  stroke-width: 3;
}
.r2 {
  --l: 45%;
  stroke-width: 6;
}
/* ... etc */

In the final result I've chosen more tints than shades, so it's not as dark as in the book-example. Firefox has issues with setting some svg-attributes in CSS, so check it out in Chrome, Edge or Safari:

---

Let's have some fun!

How about rotating those color rings – or changing the saturation? Scroll down to see and try the controls, if they're not at the top of the Pen:

To have an automated animation, animating the --r custom property, we need to register a Custom Property:

@property --r {
  syntax: "<angle>";
  initial-value: 0deg;
  inherits: false;
}

And the animation:

@keyframes rotate {
  100% {
    --r: 360deg;
  }
}

Resulting in this (you need Chrome/Edge with Houdini):

Don't stare at it too long – or you'll be hypnotized!

Thanks for reading!

Comments

[Temani Afif]

My CSS only idea: codepen.io/t_afif/pen/VwPqGyj and with rotation: codepen.io/t_afif/pen/KKabxJJ (need more html here)

[Shaiju T]

Nice 😄, Can you show us how to make CSS based animations like Thank you and Successful and congrats messages to users, using confetti css or some other technique. Like below:

tympanus.net/Development/AnimatedM...

Example:

1. Google Play Successful Payment animation with a tick mark and Confetti
2. Hackerearth Congrats Confetti as shown here

[Temani Afif]

are you challenging me ? 😛

Ok, I will think about it, maybe this will be my next post 😉

[Shaiju T]

Not challenging. Just asking if you have seen those kind of messages anywhere. I dont know how they do those kind of animation maybe using CSS or SVG.

Just want to learn cool CSS animations 😄

[Temani Afif]

Such animations are generally made using canvas. If you inspect the code you will notice a <canvas> element and then you have to dig into the JS because it's there where you will find the whole logic

[Mads Stoumann]

Nice! But it has the same issue on Chrome (MacOS), as I encountered - the edges are blurry :-(
That's why I went the svg-way, although the CSS-way is way simpler!
Looks great in Safari, though!

[Temani Afif]

yes it's a known issue when the gradient contain a lot of color stops. You can fix it by using multiple background instead: codepen.io/t_afif/pen/VwPqEmr

[Mads Stoumann]

Wow! I'm super-impressed - also at the speed you've been making these demos!

[YellowBlueVase]

Hi, but your solution doesn't let pick a color. As I understand for this purpose you HAVE TO have this color wheel on canvas to extract data with ImageData

[Braydon Coyer]

Lovely! Thanks for sharing!

[Mads Stoumann]

Thank you!