A Short Guide on How to Create Glassmorphic Elements in Pure CSS

And an intro to glassmorphism

Published in

Better Programming

3 min readNov 30, 2020

a vivid, multi-coloured pastel screen on which part of the word “glassmorphism” is transparent — Image credit: Author

Last year’s neumorphism trend was horrible and awful. In 2020 I expected something even worse, but Michał Malewicz, the creator of the neumorphism style, wrote about something fresh and good-looking — glassmorphism style.

Let’s take a look at it.

New Trend

Glassmorphism is a new trend which is getting more popular on services like Dribbble and Behance.

an example of glassmorphism applied to an app screen — Courses Dashboard by Rudi Hartono

It’s characteristic features are:

transparency (frosted-glass)
vivid or pastel colours
light border

Glassmorphism — The CSS Way

Glassmorphism is pretty easy to achieve for front-end developers. There is one main CSS property that we can use: backdrop-filter. This property allows you to apply multiple effects such as blur, sepia, and greyscale to the area behind your component. Since it applies to everything behind the component, to see the effect, you must make this element at least partially transparent.

To create the glassmorphism effect, you should use backdrop-filter: blur().

<div class="basic">
  <div class="blur"></div>
</div>.basic {
  width: 200px;
  height: 200px;
  background: rgba(255,255,255,0.4);
  position: relative;
}
.blur {
  position: absolute;
  bottom: 25px;
  right: 162px;
  width: 200px;
  height: 200px;
  background: rgba(255,255,255,0.4);
  backdrop-filter: blur(5px);
}

two squares on a screen that have had the backdrop-filter: blur() property applied to them — Basic component

The image behind has straight background: rgba(255,255,255,0.4). The element above is a copy of the first one but with an additional backdrop-filter: blur(10px) property.

This is the simplest example of a new trend. But we can go even further. You can add, as recommended by Michał Malewicz, a border radius, white border, and a little bit more blur.

The last thing you can try is to add a 1px inner border with some transparency to your shape. It simulates the glass edge and can make the shape stand out more from the background.

<div class="basic">
  <div class="blur"></div>
</div>.basic {
  width: 200px;
  height: 200px;
  background: rgba(255,255,255,0.4);
  position: relative;
}
.blur {
  position: absolute;
  bottom: 25px;
  right: 162px;
  width: 200px;
  height: 200px;
  background: rgba(255,255,255,0.4);
  backdrop-filter: blur(10px);
  border-radius: 10px;
  border: 1px solid rgba(255,255,255,0.2);
}

two squares that have had the backdrop-filter: blur() property applied to them, one with rounded corners and white border — Rounded borders and white border

Glassmorphism 2021

I hope that glassmorphism will be trendy in 2021. I would like to see real apps built in this style or have a chance to build them on my own.

Play with my hero image on codepen.

Browser Compatibility

According to Can I Use, the property backdrop-filter is fully supported by Chrome, Safari, iOS, Android Browser, and Edge. Firefox is not supported by default but can be enabled.