Just changed my mind about CSS art being 'just a gimmick'

I saw a post from someone who recreated a Van Gogh painting with nothing but box shadows and gradients. It took them like 3 months. That level of dedication made me realize this is real craftsmanship, not just showing off. Anyone else ever get humbled by a piece that looked simple at first?

2 comments

2 Comments

diana_bell7415d ago

Oh man, the thing that got me was this one CSS piece of a cat that used like 200 divs and nothing but border-radius tricks. I stared at it for ten minutes trying to wrap my head around how each little curve was made. It made me realize I've been too quick to write off stuff that doesn't look practical at first glance. For me, what helped was actually trying to copy a small piece of something similar. I spent a weekend just making a single gradient-based leaf and got totally stuck on the angles. It taught me that even if the end result seems simple, the process behind it is full of tiny decisions and math that really matters.

phoenixp3015d ago

Jumped right into trying to recreate a CSS-only fish (I know, weird choice) and completely lost my mind over the tail. It took me like five hours of tweaking border-radius percentages and clip-path coordinates to get something that even vaguely resembled fins. The wildest part was realizing the whole thing hinged on like three specific pixel values, and if you moved them even slightly the whole shape fell apart. I ended up scrapping the project but kept that single tail piece as a bookmark, just to remind myself that "simple" code is almost always hiding a mountain of tiny math.

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