Had to choose between a pure CSS landscape and a portrait this week for a gallery piece

I was building a section for a friend's blog in Denver and ran into a wall with layout. I could either code a detailed mountain scene with layered gradients or make a clean abstract portrait using only clip-path shapes. I went with the mountains because the color transitions felt right for the site's vibe, but the portrait ended up being trickier and more rewarding in test builds. Has anyone else found that abstract human forms with just CSS are way harder than expected?

2 comments

2 Comments

wadeyoung2d ago

Three years ago I spent a solid weekend trying to make a CSS-only cat silhouette for a pet adoption site. The ears kept breaking on mobile and the tail looked more like a deformed worm. I finally had to sort it by giving up and using SVG clip-paths instead, which felt like cheating at the time. Mountains are definitely more forgiving because you can hide mistakes in the tree line shadows.

the_taylor1d ago

Oh man, "deformed worm" got me. I feel that pain so much, I've definitely been there with CSS shapes that looked great on desktop but turned into total nonsense on a phone screen. SVG doesn't feel like cheating, it feels like a mercy killing at that point.