Shadowing Practice: Why I use single-color gradients in my CSS - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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Hello my friend and friend.

Something I do quite often is create gradients with a single color stop in them.

Why would I do that?

Gradients are all about interpolating from one color to another.

We want something that looks pretty.

So why would I make a gradient with a single color?

That's a really good question.

So today we're going to answer that by diving into this demo here where I have, we're going to look at a couple of different things and use cases,

but here's one of them where I have text that's hard to read because my background image is light and dark, and this happens all the time.

And so instead of using a pseudo element or something else to try and create an overlay, I can just do it with a second gradient or a second image and images happen to be gradients.

So I can do a linear gradient here and it could be any gradient, conic, radial, whatever you want.

Conic would actually save you a keystroke here.

And I just have to comma separate them.

So I do my linear gradient, comma, and then I have my URL and the linear gradient needs to be first.

So this is on top of this one.

That's the way they will layer.

and I could just come here and actually write black

and hit save and now I have a solid black color on top

which is completely useless but we could maybe use a black with a lower opacity so we'll use an HSL of 0,

0%, 0% and I'll put like a 0.5 for the alpha value

and then as we can see

if we go with a 0 here it's quite hard to read this text

and if I come in with a 0.5 now I can actually read all of my text

and you can adjust this alpha however fits for the image

and the situation you're in

and I'm using black maybe you'd want to come in with

a different color something that's a bit more on brand with the greens here

and use a blend mode or something like

that it really depends on the situation that you're in but

that would open up

that possibility as well now there is one small thing with

this is a single color gradient like this is supported in all browsers, but Chrome was actually the last one to add it and support for it isn't perfect.

It's relatively new.

So if you do want to ensure that you have farther back support, you can just come here and put a zero zero,

which looks really weird, but this will help with just having better browser support

because what these are the two color stops that we're putting for this gradient.

And the reason this works with two color stops is let's just come here and do a red comma.

We're going to keep that and then we'll put another red after this, just so we can see what this is doing.

And instead of a zero zero here, I'm gonna say this is like a 20 50 and

so now we have the red into this uh semi-transparent black color

that goes from 20 to 50 and then it transitions back to red

so the two color stops here are what are you know making this work

and if i do a zero zero it makes it valid

and then i can get rid of both of those

so again uh unnecessary maybe you're watching this in the future

you might not need to bother with this right now i would include this just to make sure

that my browser support is is decent

and this is probably the most common use case i use

it for except today our more modern stuff we're doing where things like gradient borders are all the rage

and so let's take a look at my button

that i have right here where there's my button

and i have my hover on here we're going to add a little animation to it afterwards

but let's start with just the button where i'm actually going to change my border to start with

and the border i'm going to make it i'm going to exaggerate

because it's a demo so we're going to say five pixels solid

but the trick here is to make it transparent

and this might seem a little bit strange

but we're going to start there

and then for my background here I am actually going to

stick with the background shorthand almost every time I use a background property I actually use the longhand

but using the shorthand here does help out

and it would never get me in trouble for the type of thing I'm doing here

so instead of white I'm going to do a linear gradient of white

which you know that gives us the exact same thing as we saw

so if it's save it looks exactly the same

though it did get a bit bigger just because I have the border that's on there now

and then I'm going to do a comma

and we're going to come in with another gradient in this

case I'm going to come in with a conic gradient

and let's just do something like a blue to purple

and then back to blue and we don't see it well that's kind of stupid right

if I turn this off let's

you know remove this line uh now we can see my conic gradient is there

and you'll notice something a little bit weird about it in

that the top and the bottom area have like a weird repeat going on

and that's because gradients will fill up the content box

or the padding box i should say and then they repeat underneath the border

because normally your border is visible you don't you don't have a transparent border

so it's giving it it has this it's like a weird thing with gradients

but it makes sense most of the time uh just

so you actually see your entire gradient if you happen to to have a border.

In this case, though, I want my conic gradient to fill in that space and I don't want this weird thing happening.

So I can actually come here and say this should be in my border box

and this is why I'm using the shorthand of background because this is actually doing two different things.

This is going to set both the background clip

and the background origin to border box and if we come

and take a look when I hit save on here now you can see

that conic gradient is filling up all the way into that space which is exactly what I want.

Then if I turn this white back on

and hit save I'm going to come on here and I'm going to say this should only be inside my padding box.

Then it pulls that back in and we only have the gradient on the outside

and the single color here and again I am doing it without the zero zero here.

You can add that for better browser support but then we get that going on and we have a gradient border

And I always get questions

when I do this of why am I doing it with a gradient like this instead of just using a border image.

And the reason for that is if you want to have a border radius, which I think it looks kind of cool with the border radius on there.

If you're using a border image, then you can't get that to work.

So, you know, now I can actually have my border radius and a nice little bonus tip here, I guess.

If you do 100 VW, you'll always get a pill shape.

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So let's do that here.

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I did purple.

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Let's do this as red just so it stands out a little bit more.

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and as a little bonus this has nothing to do with the color stops

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but we can get a nice little animation

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and I did a short on this where somebody suggested a way to improve the animation

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so we're going to see that on a much better way we can animate it

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so you can see here I do have an animation

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that doesn't exist yet so I'm going to do

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that at keyframes of rotate but

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that does question like what are we rotating what are we moving

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and for me it would be the easiest thing do is

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the angle we have on here now normally on backgrounds we can't do any sorts of transitions

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or animations but now we can do an at property

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which now is in all browsers

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so i'm going to do an app property of angle you can call it whatever we need

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and so the syntax of this and

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if you haven't seen this before this is called a registered custom property

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so this will be an angle

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and with the registered custom properties it's it's sort of like we're like typescript we're saying what this custom property is,

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which enables us to be able to animate the values of custom properties.

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So the syntax is angle the initial value i'm going to use turns

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so i'm going to say uh it could be degraded

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or whatever degrees is fine uh we're going to use a turn after though we're going to say zero degrees

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and then we're going to come here and say

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that the inherits inherits i'm going to put true um it's up to you it doesn't really matter

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but i'm going to say it's true

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and then we're going to come actually before we come down

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i just saw i have a small mistake here where my angle needs to have it's custom property

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so we have to start it with the double hyphen

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and then I'll come down here and we're going to say this is my from

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because conic gradients need a from of our angle

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and now everything looks the same

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but say I change this to 180 degrees the red will go on top instead

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so it's using the value here as what we have here

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but then on my rotate here what we can do now is we can say this is two

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and we want our angle to go to one turn.

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And so this is where we're actually changing the value of the custom property by first registering that custom property.

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And now when I go on top of it, you can see that it's rotating around.

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Now there is a small problem is when I come off, it just jumps.

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And this is where the commenter helped me out in giving me a better idea.

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And full credit to you.

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I don't have your name on hand, but I'll put a screenshot got up, so I just want to say thank you very much for the suggestion.

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Instead of doing that, what we're going to do is actually have this animation always on right here.

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So now it's always rotating, and that's kind of annoying that it's always rotating.

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We don't want that to happen.

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Well, hopefully not, especially at this speed.

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If you're going to do something like this, make it a lot slower than what we're doing here, because it's kind of annoying that it moves that fast.

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But ideally, it would only be when we hover.

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So then what we can actually say is the animation play state is paused.

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Is it paused or paused?

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It is paused.

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Okay.

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And then when we hover, the animation play state is running and it looks the same.

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But now if we go on top, it moves.

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But if I come off, it pauses.

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But the nice thing with that is it means it doesn't jump.

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It stops wherever it is when we come off.

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So a little bonus tip made the video a bit longer, but I hope you like that and appreciated the little bonus tip right there.

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And whether you did or not, I really do hope that you enjoyed this video, though I would really appreciate it if you hit the sub button if you haven't yet subscribed.

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I have it with that.

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I do want to thank my enabler of awesome Johnny, as well as all my other patrons and channel members for their monthly support.

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And of course, until next time, don't forget to make your corner of the internet just a little bit more awesome.

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Shadowing Practice: Why I use single-color gradients in my CSS - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing Practice: Why I use single-color gradients in my CSS - Learn English Speaking with YouTube

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About This Lesson

Key Vocabulary & Phrases

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What is the Shadowing Technique?