I used to think pure CSS art was a waste of time. Then I saw a landscape piece someone posted here last month.

Saw someone post a mountain sunset scene that looked like a photo from 30 feet away. All done with box-shadows and gradients. No images, no SVGs. I clicked inspect and spent 20 minutes just looking at their code. 800 lines of CSS for a single tree. That level of patience changed my mind about what people can actually do with this stuff. Has anyone else here gone from thinking it was pointless to getting sucked into trying one yourself?

2 comments

2 Comments

schmidt.blake17h agoMost Upvoted

Man that mountain sunset piece is exactly what hooked me too. Spent a whole evening trying to recreate a simple lighthouse using nothing but divs and gradients, ended up with a sad square and a lot of respect for those artists. Took me three tries just to get a decent looking rock formation.

janahenderson17h ago

Wait, did you say three tries just for a rock formation? That's actually pretty good. It took me a solid week once to make a simple CSS tree that didn't look like a sad green blob. @schmidt.blake, your lighthouse idea sounds like something I'd try after one too many coffees. My first attempt at anything with gradients ended up looking like a broken rainbow. But hey, those failures taught me more than any tutorial ever did. Still, I swear some of those CodePen artists are wizards or something. Take it from someone who's spent way too many evenings fighting with box shadows and border radius.