How to create background pattern using CSS & conic-gradient

Having a good background pattern can make a difference in your website design. Thanks to CSS gradients, we can create fancy and cool patterns using a few lines of code. In this post, we will study the conic-gradient and use it to create different CSS patterns.

How does conic-gradient work?

From the specification

A conic gradient starts by specifying the center of a circle, similar to radial gradients, except that conic gradient color-stops are placed around the circumference of the circle, rather than on a line emerging from the center, causing the color to smoothly transition as you spin around the center, rather than as you progress outward from the center.

And here is a figure from the MDN page

Let’s take a basic example to see how it works:

background: conic-gradient(at 75% 25%, red, blue, yel

We place the center point at X=75% and Y=25% then we create a color transition between red, blue, and yellow. As simple as that!

In most cases, we don’t need a smooth transition but rather “hard stop” colors. To do this, we need to make the color start where the previous one ends:

background: conic-gradient(at 75% 25%, red 90deg, blue 90deg 225deg, yellow 225deg)

Note the use of the same angle between two colors (90deg and 225deg). We can still do better like below

background: conic-gradient(at 75% 25%, red 90deg, blue 0 225deg, yellow 0)

By specifying 0 (a value smaller than the previous one) the browser will automatically make it equal to the previous one. This will avoid us writing the same value twice.

We still have the same center but no transition between the colors. The red is filling 90deg. The blue starts from where the red ends and continues until 225deg so it’s filling 135deg. The yellow is filling the remaining space which is also 135deg (360deg - 225deg).

If we define a background-size, we create a pattern:

Not the best pattern but it illustrates the technique we are going to use in this article to build better ones!

Checkerboard/Chessboard pattern

Let’s start with a basic pattern:

Below is a figure to understand the logic of this pattern:

It’s clear that the center of our circle is placed at the center of the background area (the default position) so we don’t need to define it. Then we have 4 colors (2 whites and 2 blacks) each one filling 90deg (25% of the area). The code will be:

background: conic-gradient(#000 90deg, #fff 0 180deg, #000 0 270deg, #fff 0);

We have repetition so we can optimize the syntax using a repeating gradient and write the colors only once

background: repeating-conic-gradient(#000 0 90deg, #fff 0 180deg);

We can also use a percentage instead of a degree

background: repeating-conic-gradient(#000 0 25%, #fff 0 50%);

Then all we have to do is to update the background-size to control the pattern.

Zig-Zag pattern

Let’s move to a more fancy pattern where we will use two gradients this time

Note that in the previous demos, I am using 90.5deg instead of 0deg to avoid jagged edges. Gradients are known to have such issues so we always update values that way to fix them.

Paper Graph pattern

For this one, we are going to use two similar gradients but with different sizes this time. In addition to the background-position, we will see that playing with background-size can help us create patterns as well.

The first gradient is defined as follows:

And it gives us the following result

The second gradient is the same but instead of 2px 2px we use 1px 1px to have thinner lines and we divide the size by 5. This will give us the logical result of the small squares (a 5x5 grid) inside a bigger one.

background: 
 conic-gradient(from 90deg at 2px 2px,#0000 90deg,#366 0) 0 0/100px 100px,
 conic-gradient(from 90deg at 1px 1px,#0000 90deg,#366 0) 0 0/20px  20px;

And using CSS variables we can optimize like below:

--s: 100px; /* control the size */
  
--_g: #0000 90deg,#366 0; /* update the color here */
background: 
 conic-gradient(from 90deg at 2px 2px,var(--_g)) 0 0/var(--s) var(--s),
 conic-gradient(from 90deg at 1px 1px,var(--_g)) 0 0/calc(var(--s)/5) calc(var(--s)/5);

Triangular pattern

After those three simple patterns, we can tackle more complex patterns using the same techniques. Let’s create some triangular patterns

For this one, we get the following for the gradients

Similar to the Zig-Zag pattern, we consider an offset for the second gradient using background-position to get the following code:

--s: 120px; /* control the size */
  
background:
  conic-gradient(from 150deg at 50% 33%,#FA6900 60deg,#0000 0) 
      calc(var(--s)/2) calc(var(--s)/1.4),
  conic-gradient(from -30deg at 50% 66%,#D95B43 60deg,#ECD078 0);
background-size: var(--s) calc(var(--s)/1.154);

Here are two more patterns with triangular shapes. For these, I will not give you a figure to illustrate each gradient. I let you dissect the code and try to understand the puzzle.

The code may look complex at first glance but if you follow simple steps you can easily understand it. First, try to isolate each gradient alone to understand the internal configuration (the colors stops and the center position) then place them above each other by disabling the repetition (set background-repeat: no-repeat) to see the pattern.

Stars pattern

Why not a pattern with stars!

Here is a step-by-step demo to illustrate the different gradients

As you can see, each gradient alone is pretty easy to understand and the combination of all gives us a good result. This is the power of gradients, we combine basic shapes to get a complex-looking pattern.

More patterns!

Before we end, I will leave you with a bunch of other examples to show you how powerful conic-gradient() is when it comes to creating fancy patterns!

Conclusion

After the different examples we saw, you should be able to create cool patterns using conic-gradient(). You may find it difficult but with some practice, you will get comfortable with the different techniques and you can easily create your patterns.

I have another article that deals with radial-gradient() if you want a follow-up on this one: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/css-radial-gradient/

Combining different gradients is another way to get even more patterns. I have made a lot of examples that you can find at css-pattern.com where I regularly publish new patterns. it’s also a Github Repository so you can Watch it and get notified when a new pattern is added.

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