CSS Linear Gradients

— 4 minute read

Gradients can make your website or application impressive and overall enhance the feel of it.

They also can be terrible and over the top (personal opinion, look at my demo... 🤷‍♂️)

Today we'll be looking into CSS Linear Gradients, which we can use and how to use them.

Types of CSS Gradients

There are two types of gradients we can leverage in CSS these two are:

  • Linear: From one side to the other side
  • Radial: Round gradient

Best to view them in action and see what they can do.

Also check my Article on Radial Gradients

CSS Linear Gradient

Let's start with the linear gradient; this one by default goes from top to bottom and accepts colors in whatever type you like (rgb,cmyk,hex,named).

.basic-linear {
  background-image: linear-gradient(#ff0000, #ffff00);
  background-image: linear-gradient(red, yellow);
  background-image: linear-gradient(rgb(255, 0, 0), rgb(255, 255, 0));
}

All the above will render the same gradient a red top that flows into a yellow bottom.

Linear Gradient Left to Right

What if we want the gradient to move from left to right?

We can pass an additional first argument.

.left-linear {
  background-image: linear-gradient(to right, red, yellow);
}

Alternatively, we can define this by giving a percentage.

.left-linear {
  background-image: linear-gradient(90deg, red, yellow);
}

By doing so, we can also make the gradient diagonal.

.diagonal-linear {
  background-image: linear-gradient(45deg, red, yellow);
  background-image: linear-gradient(to top right, red, yellow);
}

Using Multiple Colours

Another thing we can do is keep adding colors!

.multi-linear {
  background-image: linear-gradient(45deg, red, yellow, green, blue);
}

We can also state where each color should begin like so:

.multi-linear {
  background-image: linear-gradient(45deg, red 10%, yellow 50%, blue 60%);
}

Linear Gradient Transparency

This is one of the options I use transparency a lot in making something go from a solid color to a full transparent one.

Let's try black for this one.

.transparent-linear {
  background-image: linear-gradient(to right, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0), rgba(0, 0, 0, 1));
}

Repeating Linear Gradient

Something that I used in making CSS images is a repeating gradient:

.repeating-gradient {
  background-image: repeating-linear-gradient(red 10%, yellow 20%);
}

A super great tool for making awesome gradients and directly getting the code is CSSGradient.io!

Have a look at this Codepen.

See the Pen CSS Linear Gradients by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

Browser Support

CSS Gradients are very well supported. Just Opera Mini is not working, and not all browsers support the full set of options.

CSS Gradients support

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