The day I realized my CSS art was backwards, a 3 year mistake

Back in 2022 I started making these little scenery pieces with divs and gradients. Everything looked decent on my screen but I kept getting comments like "this feels off" or "the lighting is weird." I thought it was just my color choices, so I kept tweaking. Then last Tuesday I took a screenshot of one of my old pieces and flipped it horizontally in a paint program, just messing around. It looked way better flipped. Turns out I had been shading everything as if the light source was coming from the bottom right, but my brain processes light from the top left, so every single shadow was fighting the shapes. 15 pieces, all with the same wrong light direction. I fixed the newest one and posted it, and someone asked if I changed my style. Has anyone else had a fundamental logic error like that, where you just assume one thing for years and then a random mirror image shows you the truth?

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1 Comment

ben_shah9316d ago

Hold on, I actually think that whole thing is confirmation bias. Your brain seeing the flipped version as "better" just means you finally looked at it fresh, not that the light was wrong. Shadows from the bottom right are totally a thing, especially if your monitor brightness or the time of day made you lean that way, and honestly most regular people never even notice light direction unless they're looking for it. You probably just got bored of the old style and needed an excuse to change it up.