Creating a Window Text Effect with CSS

One of the best things about CSS is that it gives developers the tools to create things that normally would have to be created with photo editing or illustrator software. One of the coolest effects you can achieve using only CSS is the versatile and super simple window text effect. This is an effect you can add to your projects as a header, a logo, a hover state…the possibilities are endless. And the best part is, it’s relatively easy to achieve from scratch.

To start, you’re going to need to pick a cool image or color that you want to use as the background for your page/container. Then we’ll begin with the HTML.

The HTML

The only HTML for this effect that’s absolutely essential is a div tag and a text tag (the bigger the better, so we used an h1 tag) somewhere within that div:

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<div class="container">
<h1 class="window">COOL TEXT</h1>
</div>

The CSS

This effect is achieved entirely using CSS code. First, we’re going to import a font (we’re using Droid Sans, but feel free to experiment with your own font-family), assign that font-family to the HTML, and set up the cool image that we chose as the background of our container div:

body{
font-family: ‘Droid Sans’, sans-serif;
}

.container{
background: url(../sky.jpg);
background-size: cover;
}

That’s the easy part. Now it’s time to style the h1 tag. To style our h1, we’ll want to position it on the page using the left, top, and transform properties, change the positioning to position: absolute to ensure that all of the text remains positioned on the page once we apply the window effect, and set a large font-size and line-height property so that the effect is visible. It’s also very important that the background of the h2 tag is a dark color (we used #222) and that the color of the text is white (#fff).

h1.window{
 position: absolute;
 top: 30%;
 left: 50%;
 transform: translate(-50%, -50%);
 font-size: 100px;
 line-height: 80px;
 text-align: center;
 padding: 30px;
 color: #fff;
 cursor: pointer;
 background: #222;
}

The result of the above CSS will leave you with a result looking like this:

Screen Shot 2016-11-14 at 4.19.16 PM

As you can see, the “window” effect hasn’t been applied to the text yet, because the text is white and opaque. To make the text transparent, you’ll only need one more line of CSS: the mix-blend-mode property. The mix-blend-mode property defines how an element’s content should blend with the background. When you apply it to light text on a dark background, the text will become see-through. Here is the final line you’ll need to add to the h1’s style:

h1.window{
  mix-blend-mode: multiply;
}

Your final result should now look like this:

Screen Shot 2016-11-14 at 4.18.44 PM

Customize the code in this tutorial by adding your own text, images, colors, etc. Get creative and be sure to include this effect in one of your next projects!

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Author: Rishabh

Rishabh is a full stack web and mobile developer from India. Follow me on Twitter.

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