53 CSS linear-gradient Examples

This Scroll-Triggered Text Highlight effect mimics the experience of marking important passages with a highlighter pen as you read. Using GSAP ScrollTrigger, the highlights animate seamlessly from left to right exactly when the text enters the reader’s viewport. The component offers multiple visual styles (full background, half-height, or underline) and fully supports dark mode, making it an excellent addition to long-form articles, documentation, or educational content.

This Viking Rune Wood Toggle demonstrates how far CSS styling can go without JavaScript. It recreates a physical artifact - a wooden switch with bronze inlays and magical runes - perfect for RPG game interfaces or fantasy-themed websites. The switch features a “fire” state when active, complete with pulsating runes and floating ember particles, creating an immersive, tactile experience.

This Hand-Drawn Retro Radio Group injects personality into standard forms with a nostalgic, sketchbook aesthetic. It combines a “neo-brutalist” shadow style with subtle animations - like text jitter and a bouncing selection dot - to mimic the imperfection of hand-drawn art. The background features a CSS-generated paper texture and scanline effect, making it ideal for indie game interfaces, creative blogs, or retro-themed landing pages.

This Fading Grid Gradient Background creates a clean, architectural aesthetic suitable for SaaS landing pages or documentation sites. It features a technical vertical grid pattern that gently dissolves into a vibrant teal-and-purple gradient at the bottom. The effect mimics a “horizon” line, adding depth and structure to an otherwise flat page without using any images.

This Semantic Custom Progress Bar Kit offers a robust way to display data visualization using a “semantic-first” approach. Instead of writing empty div soup, you define your data using standard HTML5 <progress> tags. The accompanying JavaScript then “hydrates” these tags, converting them into four distinct, visually rich styles ranging from simple solids to complex gradients and striped patterns, perfect for dashboards or skill portfolios.

This Staggered Bars Reveal Animation creates a cinematic intro for landing pages using zero JavaScript. By orchestrating a single pseudo-element (::after) with complex linear-gradient backgrounds, the component simulates seven distinct bars sliding into place. The animation cleverly shifts the background-position of each gradient strip sequentially, creating a rhythmic “wipe” effect that culminates in the text appearing.

This Blooming Night Garden Animation is a delightful example of “CSS Art,” where HTML elements are shaped into complex illustrations using code. It features a complete scene with a textured night sky, procedurally blooming flowers, swaying grass, and a particle system of floating hearts, all brought to life through choreographed CSS keyframes.

This Staggered Gradient Skeleton Loader improves perceived performance by providing a visual structure while content fetches in the background. Unlike static placeholders, this Vue.js component utilizes a calculated delay system to create a “wave” animation across the grid, guiding the user’s eye naturally from top-left to bottom-right without using complex JavaScript animation libraries.

The Border Image Fill Gradient Overlay is a minimalist CSS technique used to add a decorative or functional gradient over background images. Unlike traditional methods that require extra HTML markup or ::before/::after pseudo-elements, this approach uses a single, underutilized property to enhance text contrast and visual depth.

This Pure CSS Synthwave 80s Animation captures the nostalgic aesthetic of the 1980s retrowave genre. It features a complete animated scene: an infinite neon grid, a setting sun with scanlines, shaking palm trees, and a DeLorean driving into the distance. The scene is brought to life with a driving synthwave audio track and intricate CSS-only motion.

A pure CSS illustration of a knight constructed from geometric primitives. It employs repeating-linear-gradient for shield textures, clip-path for armor shaping, and extensive box-shadow duplication to render limbs and details efficiently, creating a stark, high-contrast monochrome aesthetic.

A spotlight navigation menu where the active state is highlighted by a moving “light beam” element.

A unique drop cap is created with modern CSS techniques - its complex background is generated by layering linear-gradient and repeating-conic-gradient, while its responsive size is managed by calc().

A skeuomorphic toggle design achieved by combining multiple linear-gradients for the body and box-shadow to create a volumetric effect. The smooth switching animation and “glow” in the active state are implemented via transition with a custom cubic-bezier curve.

A demonstration of pixel art creation using only CSS gradients and box-shadow animation, without a single image file or extra HTML elements.

An animated loader button using jQuery and SCSS, where progress is implemented via an @for loop that generates 101 linear-gradient rules - the state is changed through a custom attribute updated by JS.

This React component library demonstrates a technically clean solution for displaying color gradients.

Pure CSS skeuomorphism in action - a complete replica of a MIDI controller where every knob, pad, and key is drawn by layering dozens of gradients and shadows.

This loader achieves a liquid-smooth animation by calculating progress on the JavaScript requestAnimationFrame loop and programmatically updating the CSS linear-gradient background property to create dynamic color shifts.

A futuristic 3D data block where scrolling digital “circuits” are simulated purely in CSS by animating the background-position of linear-gradient patterns.

A classic skeleton loader pattern implemented via pure CSS. The shimmer effect utilizes a wide linear-gradient and animates background-position to simulate a passing wave of light indicating active data fetching.

A sophisticated striped background pattern built with pure CSS using the linear-gradient hard-stop technique. This lightweight snippet offers a high-performance, responsive UI solution that mimics complex textures without the need for external image assets.

A modern and clean way to indicate scrollability: the “fade-to-mist” effect is implemented using mask-image and linear-gradient, while key parameters of the fade phase are precisely tuned using @property.

A skeuomorphic 3D button created with multi-layered box-shadow and linear-gradient to simulate volume, highlights, and shadows. On :hover, the box-shadow styles are animated, creating a “pressed” effect.

This demo features subtle but effective micro-interactions implemented entirely in CSS. The social login buttons and the primary submit button use a transform: scale(1.1) on :hover to create a satisfying “pop” effect, enhancing the user experience with minimal code.

This is a complete UI component blending aesthetic animation with functional form design. Staggered CSS keyframe animations bring the inline SVG to life, while the form itself features modern styling techniques, including a performant gradient-transition button and absolutely positioned Feather icons.

A smooth, rhythmic pulsation that creates a sense of “alive” waiting while keeping the page structure stable.

A complex visual placeholder structure implemented without cluttering the DOM, automatically disabling itself when content appears.

A pure CSS infographic visualizing coffee recipes through layered gradients within stylized cups.

A stylish odometer-like counter animation crafted with SCSS.

A visually accurate barcode that is theoretically scannable (given correct proportions), created without images or fonts by simply styling HTML tags.

A creative divider made by layering two pseudo-elements - an animated rainbow gradient and a masking dashed line that “punches” holes in it using a linear-gradient.

A technically interesting solution for a UI card where recipe details (time, level) are organized via inline blocks within an unstyled list, styled using pseudo-classes for precise adjustment of child element margins and styles, avoiding excessive classes.

The business card design showcases pure CSS, utilizing linear-gradient and a pseudo-element to create a multicolor gradient background, alongside absolute positioning for layering; it also applies the CSS filter sepia(1) to the image and a box-shadow for depth, with all text styled in the monospace font courier.

This button implements an aesthetic “sliding gradient” hover effect using a large ::after pseudo-element filled with a multi-stop linear gradient, which is horizontally translated from -280px to -200px on hover.

The button animation uses SVG rect elements and CSS stroke-dasharray and stroke-dashoffset properties to create a sophisticated, drawing border effect that transitions smoothly on hover, highlighting the call-to-action.

A multi-layered button where the background, border, and pseudo-elements are styled with different linear-gradients. A SCSS mixin, @mixin buttonLayer, is used for reusing the styles of the pseudo-elements.

The badge uses background: rgba() and backdrop-filter: blur(10px) to create a translucent, frosted look. A double layer with ::before adds depth and enhances the blur effect.