CSS Neon Animation

— 5 minute read

Guys! Thank you all 🥳, I've hit 100 subscribers to my Newsletter and I'm over the moon!

It means a lot to me that people choose to read my articles and subscribe to receive my email every day, from the bottom of my heart: Thank you! 🧁

Therefore in this tutorial I want to make a cool 100 subs CSS neon animation to celebrate.

See below what we'll be building today: this amazing neon text effect in pure CSS:

See the Pen CSS Neon Animation by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

HTML Structure

As for our HTML we need the following structure:

<div class="container">
  <div class="text">
    <b>100 s<span>u</span>bs</b>
  </div>
</div>

We are going to use the container to center the text and use the span to make a cool neon glitch / flicker effect.

CSS Neon Text effect

First we are going to import a cool Google font, which looks like it could be used for neon letters.

@import url(//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Pacifico);

Now on to our neon effect!

.text b {
  font: 400 25vh 'Pacifico';
  letter-spacing: -5px;
  color: #fee;
  text-shadow: 0 0px 10px, 0 0 1em #560a86, 0 0 0.5em #560a86, 0 0 0.1em #560a86,
    0 10px 3px #333;
}

As you see, we are setting our font to be the Google Font. Then we give it a font-weight of 25vh (25% Viewport Height.

Then we use the text-shadow to to give the letters a neon effect. We add multiple neon glow layers and end with a dark grey to make the bright glow appear thicker. Very similar to a neon light with gas.

Note: You can use a cool tool like this for creating text-shadows

Neon CSS Animation

We added a glitch on the u letter. A flicker effect is quite common with neon glass tubes. So we can re-create it by using CSS animations.

.text b span {
  animation: flicker linear infinite 2s;
}

@keyframes flicker {
  75% {
    color: inherit;
    text-shadow: inherit;
  }
  76% {
    color: #222;
  }
  77% {
    color: inherit;
    text-shadow: none;
  }
  78% {
    color: inherit;
    text-shadow: inherit;
  }
  79% {
    color: #222;
    text-shadow: none;
  }
  80% {
    color: inherit;
    text-shadow: inherit;
  }
  90% {
    color: #222;
    text-shadow: none;
  }
  90.5% {
    color: inherit;
    text-shadow: inherit;
  }
}

The actual animation is a mix of resetting the color and removing the text-shadow for a split second. This makes the letter appear as if it is flickering due to some temporary electric discharge.

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