Subscribe

CSS Disco Text

✍️

Learn how to create text with a disco effect using CSS hue-rotate. See the code examples in the Codepen!

14 Aug, 2020 · 3 min read

Today I will teach you something useless but fun! I will teach you how to create text with a disco effect in CSS.

I wanted to explore the hue-rotate function and didn’t have any better use case for it.

If you have an excellent use case drop me a message!

HTML Structure

<div class="container">
  <input type="checkbox" />
  <div>D I S C O</div>
  <i>click above</i>
  <span></span>
</div>

I’m going with a sluggish solution today, and we’ll use an invisible checkbox to get the party started 🥳.

Our text will be one word. It will be the star of the show. And a span element for the background effect.

Disco Text effect with CSS Hue-rotate

For the text effect, the main idea is to showcase the power of the hue-rotate filter in CSS.

But let’s start with the basic styling:

.container {
  position: relative;
  display: flex;
  height: 100vh;
  align-items: center;
  justify-content: center;
  flex-direction: column;
}

The most important part here is the relative position. The other is just basic centering with flex.

.container span {
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  background: #efefef;
  position: absolute;
  z-index: -1;
  transition: all 0.5s ease;
}

This span will be our virtual background, so we give it a starting grey color and position it absolute on the whole background.

We then add a transition on all effects.

.container div {
  position: relative;
  width: auto;
  background: #1d1e21;
  color: #555;
  padding: 20px 40px;
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
  align-items: center;
  font-size: 46px;
  cursor: pointer;
  margin: 0 4px;
  border-radius: 25px;
  box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
  transition: all 0.5s ease;
}

Now for our main div, it’s nothing fancy, with some general styling to make it look nice.

This article uses a checkbox to turn our disco on/off. We’ll make the checkbox invisible across our whole page for easy usability.

input[type='checkbox'] {
  position: absolute;
  opacity: 0;
  cursor: pointer;
  height: 100%;
  width: 100%;
  z-index: 100;
}

Ok, on to the magic part: What happens if we click this checkbox:

input[type='checkbox']:checked ~ span {
  background: #333;
}

First, we make our background span a darker color to “turn the lights off.”

And then, we turn the actual disco text on with this CSS code:

input[type='checkbox']:checked ~ div {
  box-shadow: 0px 0px 5px rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.5);
  color: yellow;
  text-shadow: 0 0 15px yellow, 0 0 25px yellow;
  animation: glow 5s linear infinite;
}

The glow animation is where the excellent disco effect takes place:

@keyframes glow {
  0% {
    filter: hue-rotate(0deg);
  }
  100% {
    filter: hue-rotate(360deg);
  }
}

There we go! This is how to create a text with animating disco colors.

See the Code example on Codepen

The result is in the following Codepen:

See the Pen CSS Disco Text by Chris Bongers (@rebelchris) on CodePen.

Browser Support

As you can imagine, such a cool CSS feature comes at the price of not supporting every browser :(.

There is a polyfill, but also limited.

CSS Filter support

Thank you for reading, and let’s connect!

Thank you for reading my blog. Feel free to subscribe to my email newsletter and connect on Facebook or Twitter

Spread the knowledge with fellow developers on Twitter
Tweet this tip
Powered by Webmentions - Learn more

Read next 📖

Modifying an SVG path with CSS

10 Dec, 2022 · 2 min read

Modifying an SVG path with CSS

Animate an SVG path with CSS

9 Dec, 2022 · 2 min read

Animate an SVG path with CSS

Join 2099 devs and subscribe to my newsletter