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UI with rotating color scheme


Reading : 3min

Article également dispo en [FR] Animer les couleurs d'une interface

For my latest UI project Sticky Elements, I had a lot of fun making a rotating color scheme for the entire UI. Gradients on background, text colors and even sliders (<input type="range">). And all that, only with CSS.

Animating color

Animating colors is very easy thanks to CSS animations. In my specific case, I create an animation that will shift colors on chromatic circle using the hsl function (cause it's more legible), like so:

@keyframes wheelHueColor {
    from, to { color: hsl(324, 70%, 45%); }
    10%      { color: hsl(360, 65%, 45%); }
    20%      { color: hsl( 36, 80%, 45%); }
    30%      { color: hsl( 72, 75%, 35%); }
    40%      { color: hsl(108, 65%, 35%); }
    50%      { color: hsl(144, 75%, 35%); }
    60%      { color: hsl(180, 75%, 35%); }
    70%      { color: hsl(216, 60%, 45%); }
    80%      { color: hsl(252, 65%, 50%); }
    90%      { color: hsl(288, 60%, 40%); }

.text {
    animation: wheelHueColor 100s infinite;

Then, the animation is used with a duration of 100s and repeated indefinitely. I've also added a fallback color in case the animation cannot be seen (no browser support, disable by user, etc.). And that's it.

Note : in order to produce better transitions between colors, it's preferable to add more than two steps in our keyframes, even if it's theoritically useless. In addition, we can adjust saturation and lightness of each color's step.

Animating a gradient

To animate a CSS gradient, it's a bit more complicated. Four years ago, I've shared two small tips (in French) to make this happen, but both solutions have pitfalls. To sum up quickly:

  • The first one is to use a background-color as base, then add a semi-transparent gradient on top and animate the underlying color. The drawback is that you can't animate multiple colors, because your gradient remains the same.
  • The second one is to use box-shadow with inset keyword and a large spread value to fake a CSS gradient. This way you can animate multiple colors, but it isn't really practical, nor reliable.

It's still impossible to animate a CSS gradient today 1 (still waiting cross-fade()), so I decided to play with CSS blending modes. The key here is to use a background color (animated with CSS) and a gradient on top with a blend mode applied. I've chosen the overlay one.

To animate the background color, we can create a new CSS @keyframes that will modify the background-color property. But, we can also reuse the wheelHueColor animation that we've already created, based on color. To make it work, we have to set the currentColor value to background-color. This way, while animating, the actual text color is also set on the background.

For the gradient, a simple white to black linear-gradient will suit our needs. It's applied with its blend mode only when background-blend-mode: overlay is supported by the browser, thanks to @supports. No disgraceful black and white gradient on unsupported browsers.

The result code looks like this:

.text {
    animation: inherit;
.background {
    animation: wheelHueColor 100s infinite;
    background-color: currentColor;
@supports (background-blend-mode: overlay) {
    .background {
        background-image: linear-gradient(45deg, white 10%, black 90%);
        background-blend-mode: overlay;

And here is a demo:

See the Pen wMbPMj by iamvdo (@iamvdo) on CodePen

  1. Even if it should be. See support right now: Open JSBin

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