If you're a web designer, you might be familiar with Photoshop's (or other drawing program) "drop shadow" layer property. It gives that layer a small shadow, creating the illusion of it floating on top of the image canvas.

On the world of web development, there is a similar feature in CSS3 called a box-shadow. The basics of box-shadow property will be explained below with many CSS3 live demos, and we'll see a few of the cool capabilities this CSS3 property allows us to do.

More CSS3 related article to practice yourself:
- HTML Button with CSS3: Tiny & Helpful Demo plus Tutorial
- Great Collection of Extreme CSS3, JavaScript Tutorials
- Simple Awesome Inline Modal Box with CSS3
- Beautiful and Stunning CSS3 Animation Experiments
- Awesome jQuery Accordion with CSS3 and HTML5

• Demo
• Enlarge
• Reload
• New window

---

Standard Shadow

.standard-shadow { box-shadow: 1px 1px 1px rgba(0,0,0,0.5); }

The above code would generate a shadow like this:

You have your first 2 values which give the horizontal and vertical offsets of the shadow, a third value which sets the amount of blur you want to apply and lastly a color (in which case we use an rgba() value for a half opacity black). Box-shadow is supported on every modern browser, but if you are so incredibly inclined, a -webkit and -moz prefix would come in handy for full support of those older browsers. Now, you may think "Oh, well that's nice. Now I can make a shadow, woohoo" but things aren't over just yet!

Glow

.glow-shadow { box-shadow: 0 0 5px 1px #09F; }

Look at that! We adjust the offset so that the "shadow" is basically centered on the element. We expanded the blur radius to 5px, added a new value to 1 px, that value being "spread". This gives a sort of extra "thickness" to the shadow.

Another Border

.border-shadow { box-shadow: 0 0 0 2px #F00; }

Keeping the 0 x and y offset, but lowering the blur to 0 will basically use the spread value as the thickness for an extra border! This can come in handy when an input has the wrong info, or you want to add a border to an element without affecting it's size and position (shadows, unlike borders, don't shift or add to an element's width).

Multiple Shadow

.multi-shadow { box-shadow: 0 0 5px 1px #09F, 0 0 0 2px #F00; }

Interestingly enough, one of the neat features of box-shadow is the ability to stack them! By separating each set of values with a comma, you can add multiple shadows to a single element. This technique has been used to make some crazy things.

Inset Shadow

.inset-shadow { box-shadow: inset 1px 1px 4px #000; }

Last, but not least, by adding an "inset" value before all our other values, we can have the shadow radiate from the inside (a la Photoshop's inner shadow/glow) instead of out. This effect comes in handy for a pressed button or to add an inner glow to an element.

And those are the basics of the box-shadow! There's still more you can do too; here are a few more fancy tricks you can do! In particular, there are extra examples of what that optional "spread" value can do.

• Code
• Print

• Comment (0)
• Write

by Preview

Cancel reply

Write your comment

Comments of Guest will be previwed before published
Give your real email to get notifying replies, or comment will be deleted

Your name *
Your email^g *
Your site

Comment's title

I assure 100% I am real human
I repeat I am not bot

• Sent (0)
• New