Suzanne Aitchison

Posted on Jul 4, 2020

5 lessons from 50 days of CSS art

#showdev #css #webdev #codepen

50 days ago I started out on my project for 100 Days Project Scotland - to create a piece of CSS art every day for 100 days. I wrote about my motivations here:

Join Me for 100 Days of Pure CSS

Suzanne Aitchison ・ May 16 '20 ・ 2 min read

#css #html #webdev #codepen

I hadn't really tackled any CSS art before this project, and it's been a fun journey to date! Today marks the halfway point, and I thought I'd share an update on what I've learned so far.

My top 5 learnings so far

1. Simple is often most effective

Throughout the last 50 days I've spent a varying amount of time and effort on each creation, and some days I've gotten really carried away with complex shapes, animations, and so on.

But - some of my most popular creations to date have been the simplest. Like this sheep, which is pretty much made of two colours, and a lot of circles!

So my advice to anyone else getting started with CSS art would be to focus on pictures you can make with a few basic shapes, and keep your colour palette as minimal as possible, as it can help the image look more striking.

2. Clip-path is very, very useful

Before I started this project I'd never had a need to use the CSS property clip-path. I'm not even sure I'd heard of it!

Clip-path allows you to define a shape that will determine what parts of your HTML element are shown. You can use it to create all different kinds of shapes! Check out the MDN web docs for clip-path.

Even better, there's a great tool for creating these shapes in a handy UI - Clippy. I've used this tool a whole lot in the last 50 days 😄

For example, I used it to create some random leaf shapes for my leafcutter ants to carry:

3. Gradients can be a time-saver (and a div-saver)

Quite often I've found that I need either stripes, or several neighbouring blocks of different colour. Until I started this project I hadn't fully appreciated how far CSS gradients can get you in this respect, especially with the ability to add fixed stops in a gradient to create hard stripes, rather than colours gently fading from one to another.

For example, I used a linear-gradient with some very gentle grading to create both the tail and wing stripes for this parrot:

And a repeating-linear-gradient to repeat a bunch of stripes in opposite directions on this ice cream cone:

4. CSS variables are scope-able and very helpful

I'd used CSS variables before, and immediately employed them in this project as it makes life so much easier to be able to e.g. edit all your colours in one place, defining/using like so:

:root {
  --ice-cream-color: #FCB8C3;
  --ripple-color: #FC889B;
  --cone-color: #F7C077;
  --waffle-color: #F3A63A;
}

.scoop {
  background: var(--ice-cream-color);
}

I usually have the same colour used in a few places in the picture, and being able to change it in one place is such a huge benefit 🙏

Something I hadn't really done with CSS variables before though was using them in a scoped fashion. Instead of declaring a variable value in the :root like above, you can declare them within a CSS certain selector and they'll be applied within that scope.

For example, in this cogs animation, the three cogs share a class which defines the majority of their appearance and behaviour. To make them slightly different sizes and colours, I used scoped CSS variables e.g.

.cog-one {
  --cog-color: #898888;
  --cog-outer-size: 50px;
}

.cog-two {
  --cog-color: #A16036;
  --cog-outer-size: 40px;
}

.cog {
  border: var(--cog-outer-size) solid var(--cog-color);
}

5. Inspiration can come from the mundane

A big part of the challenge especially initially was trying to think what on earth to make. It had to be simple enough that I could actually do it within a reasonable time frame, but also interesting enough to be enjoyable and hopefully a bit eye-catching.

And it turns out that some of the most boring things have been the most enjoyable to code and share 😄 So far my creations have included pretty banal stuff like my washing machine, a mug of tea, a cup of coffee, and a toaster:

Fancy joining me?

I'm looking forward to the second half of the project, and if you feel inspired to try some CSS art I'd love to follow you too!

You can connect with me and follow my creations on my CodePen profile, or on my Twitter.

I've found CodePen, like DEV, to be a really supportive community and I've been given a lot of encouragement and motivation there. Hopefully if you decide to a give it a go too, you'll find the same!

Hope to see you there, and for now I'll leave you with my day 50 creation - some celebratory balloons 👋🎉🎈

Latest comments (39)

Robert Lipscomb • Sep 16 '20

I'm a fairly inexperienced web developer (it's mostly a hobby - I have yet to land gigs doing it to make money). I need to take on some challenges like this to push myself. I'm amazed at these creations and had no idea CSS itself could be so powerful! Thank you for sharing this. :)

Suzanne Aitchison • Sep 16 '20

Thank you so much! I had so much fun with this challenge - definitely recommend finding some coding "just for fun" like this if you do have time 😊 sometimes we put so much pressure on pushing ourselves and forget that we can also just take some time to see what weird things we can make CSS do 😂

Suzanne Aitchison • Jul 24 '20

Thank you so much! Some attempts go better than others 😂

nandhu_sathish • Jul 23 '20

Wow really cool!

Suzanne Aitchison • Jul 23 '20

Thank you!

Rohit Prasad • Jul 10 '20

Nice. Why CSS over SVG ?

Suzanne Aitchison • Jul 10 '20

Just for the challenge! Definitely planning to get more into SVG after the challenge is over.

It seems to me SVG is more practical for professional use-cases, but I wanted to play with some CSS 😁

Julie Plummer • Jul 8 '20

Wow - looks great, and the code looks doable too!
Thanks

Suzanne Aitchison • Jul 8 '20

Definitely doable! A lot of can be achieved by making divs into circles and squares and placing them next to each other really 😁

abhay tripathi • Jul 6 '20

Hi Suzanne,
There are many devs who are taking similar challenges and coming up with great work. But what I like the most about yours is the simplicity. You came up with little everyday things and than tried to implement it in simplest form. Great job. Inspiring. Keep moving forward.

Suzanne Aitchison • Jul 6 '20

Thank you! Yes totally, part of why I wanted to do this challenge was to have a bit of regular coding that is purely for fun, so keeping it simple, bright and breezy is definitely key 😀