Beginner’s Guide to CSS3 (Updated)

By Sivakumar K. in Web Design. Updated on August 23, 2022.

Since its announcement back in 2005, the development of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) level 3, or better known as CSS3, has been closely watched and monitored by designers and developers worldwide.

This post is dedicated to those who want to learn more, and get your hands dirty on coding CSS 3. It’s a compilation of useful CSS3 reads, sample codes, tips, tutorials, cheat-sheets, and more. Feel free to use them in your projects; just make sure it falls gracefully on incompatible browsers.

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Boost your web designs with our guide to 20 must-know CSS tips and tricks. Read more

Getting Started with CSS3

Take Your Design To The Next Level With CSS3

Advantages of CSS3, with explanations and examples of CSS3 properties and selectors.

CSS3: Progressive Enhancement

How you can use graceful (or, progressive) enhancement techniques to make use of CSS3 features in browsers that support them, while ensuring that your code will still provide a satisfactory user experience in older browsers that do not yet support those features.

CSS3 Background and Borders

CSS3 Rounded Corners

A collection of code snippets to create rounded corner with CSS3’s border-radius property.

CSS3 Border Image

How to use images with border-image property to create a more compelling borders.

CSS3 Gradient Borders

Did you know that you can also create borders with color gradients?

CSS3 Borders, Backgrounds and Boxes

Detail explanation with examples of new CSS3 properties like: background-clip, background-origin, background-attachment, box-shadow, box-decoration-break, border-radius and border-image.

CSS3 Text

Letterpress Effect

Create simple letterpress effect with CSS3.

Six text effects using text shadow

Text effects include: vintage/retro, neon, inset, anaglyphic, fire and board game.

Text masking effect

Interactive text masking effect using the text-shadow CSS property.

CSS Selection Styling

Change text selection colors with CSS3.

Perspective Text

You can use CSS3 Transform to create a fluid modern perspective for text.

CSS3 Text Gradient

Grandient can also be applied on text, making text more colorful and pop.

Text Mask

CSS3 also allows you to blend and image onto text using background-clip which gives the text more depth.

Multiple-columns content

Using CSS3 to create a set of columns on your website without having to assign individual layers and (or) paragraphs for each column. You can take a look at this example on CodePen.io for a more compelling Newsletter-like layout with CSS3 Columns.

CSS3 Drop Shadow

Drop Shadown in Image

Showcase several techniques and some of the possible appearances for dropping shadows without using images.

Glow Tabs with Box Shadow

How to create intuitive and beautiful tabs in CSS3 with no image.

CSS3 Menus

Sexy Tooltips with Just CSS

How to use the evolving CSS standard can enhance some lovely cross-browser tooltips.

More tooltips:

How to spice up your menu with CSS3

Learn how to create an elegant menu with image slide-in and slide-out as you hover over the menu.

Dropdown menu

How to create a Apple.com alike multi-level dropdown menu using border-radius, box-shadow, and text-shadow.

CSS3-Only Tabbed Area

Click on a tab, hide all the panels, show the one corresponding to tab just clicked on – all with CSS.

CSS3 Buttons and Bubbles

Speech Bubbles

Various forms of speech bubble effect created with CSS 2.1 and enhanced with CSS3.

Github alike buttons

Collection of buttons that show what is possible using CSS3 while also maintaining the simplest possible markup.

Generators

CSS Button Generator

Tool to help you create a button style conveniently. Use the options to change the size, color, border, shadow, and text shadow.

Neumorphism

Generate Neumorphism styles which is a quite popular design direction in some mobile applications.

CSS3 Gradient Editor

Allows you to generate CSS3 gradient with cross-browser compatibility. You can compose a simple gradient to a more complex ones with multiple layers of gradient colors.

Animista

Generate smooth CSS3 transitions with an intuitive UI and quickly with some of the presets.

Keyframes App

A tool that makes creating complex animation a lot easier. Compose many CSS3 properties like colors, transforms, sizing, spacing, and click the “Play” button to play it immediately.

Cross-browser CSS3 Rule Generator

CSS3 rules you can copy and paste onto your own stylesheet.

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