Animating a CSS Gradient Border

How to Create a CSS Gradient Border with Animation

Do you want to give your website some extra style and pizzazz? Animating a CSS gradient border is a great way to do just that. CSS gradients are an excellent way to add visual interest to your website, as well as helping to create a modern, minimal aesthetic.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to create a simple CSS gradient border with animation. We’ll walk you through the code step-by-step, so you can easily apply it to your own website.

Step 1: Set Up Your HTML Document

The first step is to create a basic HTML document. This should include a head element, as well as a body element. We won’t actually be using the head element for anything in this tutorial, but it’s always a good idea to set one up when you’re creating a web page.

Step 2: Add the CSS to Animate the Border

Next, we need to add in the code to animate our border. For this, we’ll be using a couple of CSS3 animation properties. We’ll start by setting up the keyframes first:

@keyframes animatedBorder {
  0% {
    border-width: 0px;
  }
  50% {
    border-width: 5px;
  }
  100% {
    border-width: 0px;
  }
}

This code creates a keyframe animation that starts with no border, transitions to a five pixel border at the halfway point, and then transitions back to having no border at the end.

Next, we need to set up the actual animation code:

div {
  animation-name: animatedBorder;
  animation-duration: 2s;
  animation-timing-function: linear;
  animation-iteration-count: infinite;
  background-image: linear-gradient(to right, #4776e6, #8e54e9);
  border-radius: 5px;
  border-style: solid;
  width: 300px;
  height: 200px;
}

This code creates the animation, specifying that it will loop infinitely and have a duration of two seconds. We’ve also specified the background-image to be a linear gradient, so that our border will be a nice shade of purple. Finally, we’ve added a border-radius to round the corners and given it a width and height of 300px and 200px respectively.

Step 3: Preview Your Animation

Now that you’ve written the code, you should be able to preview the animation in your browser. You should see a purple gradient border that animates between a zero pixel width and a five pixel width, looping continuously.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we’ve shown you how to create a simple CSS gradient border with animation. Once you’ve got the basics down, you can start experimenting with different colors, shapes, and duration times to create more interesting animations.