Gradient Borders in CSS | CSS-Tricks

Let’s say you need a gradient border around an element. My mind goes like this:

There is no simple obvious CSS API for this.
I’ll just make a wrapper element with a linear-gradient background, then an inner element will block out most of that background, except a thin line of padding around it.

Perhaps like this:

If you hate the idea of a wrapping element, you could use a pseudo-element, as long as a negative z-index value is OK (it wouldn’t be if there was much nesting going on with parent elements with their own backgrounds).

Here’s a Stephen Shaw example of that, tackling border-radius in the process:

You could even place individual sides as skinny pseudo-element rectangles if you didn’t need all four sides.

But don’t totally forget about border-image, perhaps the most obtuse CSS property of all time. You can use it to get gradient borders even on individual sides:

Using both border-image and border-image-slice is probably the easiest possible syntax for a gradient border, it’s just incompatible with border-radius, unfortunately.

DigitialOcean documents the same approach in another tutorial.

Comments

RyanIndustries8

# December 28, 2018

These are all great solutions, but I really hope in the near future linear-gradient on borders will be a reality. Would really help when making CSS graphics.

Brad Kemper

# December 28, 2018

Hey Chris,

Yes, it was intended that you could use linear-gradient and border-image together. If you need rounded borders too, you should be able to do that with SVG and border image. I’ve successfully done that before without distorting the corners or anything. Let me know if you want me to post an example.

Chris Coyier

Permalink to comment# December 28, 2018

I’m sure everyone would enjoy having a demo like that to reference, including me!

Brad Kemper

# December 28, 2018

When we were designing how border-image should work (many years ago), the thought was that the image would contain whatever rounded or fancy corners you wanted, and border-radius would only be used as a fallback, not as something that further clipped the corners.

sonya brimecombe

Permalink to comment# January 7, 2019

yep i agree I would of done the same thing as well.

Doug S.

# December 28, 2018

Wasn’t working for me on Firefox 64 until I changed the border-image to border-image-source as border-image-slice: 1 was being overridden in the cascade.

Anders Grimsrud

# December 28, 2018

Funnily enough, browser support seems to be inconsistent for the last example. When border-image-slice is declared in advance and there’s no value for slice set in the border-image shorthand, as in the example above, Firefox 64 and Safari on iOS 12 uses the default slice value (which is 100%, resulting in border-image: <image> 100%;) while Chrome 71 and Opera cascades the previously declared value into the shorthand (which gives border-image: <image> 1;).

Brad Kemper

Permalink to comment# December 28, 2018

Shorthands do normally reset the longhands to their initial values when left out, so I don’t know why Chrome and Opera wouldn’t. The last example seems to be fixed in iOS12 by changing border-image to border-image-source in those two classes.
SelenIT

Permalink to comment# January 1, 2019

Looks much like a Chromium bug in the cascade. Interestingly, Chrome DevTools in both “Styles” and “Computed” tabs displays the value 1 of border-image-slice struck-through, and Computed styles tab shows the value 100% coming from the shorthand declaration as overriding it — as it should be — but the value 1 appears to somehow mysteriously “survive” this overriding.

As a side note, I disagree that border-image (as well as its longhand sub-properties) is “obtuse”. It’s arguably the most misunderstood CSS properties of all time, and maybe significantly underrated, especially in combination with SVG images. Some of its abilities like 9-slice scaling and — especially — painting things outside the element’s box (via border-image-outset) are unique in CSS, and can provide much shorter and cleaner solutions to many cases that otherwise would require hacking around pseudo-elements or even extra markup.

Joe Kotlan (@Jkotlan)

# December 29, 2018

Not sure about the last two. I’m getting different results in iOS Safari. I’d give it a look.

ccprog

# December 29, 2018

Here is a variant with SVG: https://codepen.io/ccprog/pen/BvwbKX?editors=1100 It tries to expose as many specifics to CSS as possible. Note that SVG 2 would allow rx/ry to be defined as CSS properties, but implementation is as yet incomplete. Gradient positioning must also be done in the markup. Border positioning follows SVG rules, which means half the border overflows the box.

George W. Park

# December 31, 2018

I have a pen showing how you can use background-clip to create rounded gradient borders https://codepen.io/GeorgePark/pen/EEGJEj

Jupago

# January 1, 2019

Thanks for writing this! I used the first option recently when a student wanted to have a gradient border animated.
Worked out pretty well: https://codepen.io/jupago/ Did not know about border-image-slice. Might also be fun to try clip-path. That 24ways article on Clip Paths got me wondering if that will eventually be the the next best thing. https://24ways.org/2018/clip-paths-know-no-bounds/

Klesus

# January 1, 2019

Been playing around with the Stephen Shaw’s ::before border. I tried applying it to one of my working projects and it seems that if you apply any sort of transform to the base element, then the pseudo element overrides the background color/image of the base element. I don’t know any way to make this work together with transform, just something to keep in mind, and a challenge to find a workaround.

Alex Overbeck

# April 19, 2019

I was able to come up with a pretty simple, single element, solution to this using multiple backgrounds and the background-origin property.

.wrapper {
  background: linear-gradient(#222, #222), 
              linear-gradient(to right, red, purple);
  background-origin: padding-box, border-box;
  background-repeat: no-repeat; /* this is important */
  border: 5px solid transparent;
}

The nice things about this approach are:
1. It isn’t affected by z-index
2. It can scale easily by just changing the width of the transparent border

Check it out: https://codepen.io/AlexOverbeck/pen/axGQyv?editors=1100

Chris Coyier

# January 31, 2022

From reader Fabian Michael:

Hi, I found another solution to the problem, based on the good old 9-slice scaling technique. The CSS is rather extensive, but it does not need any extra SVG elements in your document or any additional elements nesting and might be interesting for some of you:

Geoff Graham

# November 21, 2022

Another one from reader Blaz Kemperle:

I needed a responsive button with border-gradient and radius and transparent background, and after the developers “it can’t be done” I coded it by myself.

Geoff Graham

# February 3, 2023

Aaaaaaand another from reader Rogério Chaves:

You can just add clip-path: inset(0 round 5px)

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