mix-blend-mode: multiply

By  on  

One of my favorite interview questions is "how do you stay current on emerging front-end techniques and APIs?"  I always get the standard "blogs" and "RSS" answers but rarely do I ever hear "from gurus on Twitter."  I find that strange because I learn loads from Twitter, especially when it comes to CSS, because a tiny snippet can do something really neat.

I had heard CSS mix-blend-mode was something awesome but this blew my mind:

Essentially, using mix-blend-mode: multiply; on an image with white background would turn that white into a level of opacity as though the image were a .png with opacity.  Whoa!  I created a demo here:

What an awesome bit of CSS!  Thanks to Wes Bos for the heads up on this nifty CSS feature!

Recent Features

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    WebKit Marquee CSS:  Bringin&#8217; Sexy Back

    We all joke about the days of Web yesteryear.  You remember them:  stupid animated GIFs (flames and "coming soon" images, most notably), lame counters, guestbooks, applets, etc.  Another "feature" we thought we had gotten rid of was the marquee.  The marquee was a rudimentary, javascript-like...

  • By
    Creating Spacers with Flexbox

    I was one of the biggest fans of flexbox before it hit but, due to being shuffled around at Mozilla, I never had the chance to use it in any practice project; thus, flexbox still seems like a bit of a mystery to me.  This greatly...

Discussion

  1. zakius

    you know why twitter is bad source? cause it’s just like any channel throwing everything in single place: you’ll miss many important things, twitter is meant for things that are important only in a given moment, not for sharing knowledge

  2. Florian Reuschel

    Holy moly, this is amazing. Didn’t know that’s possible at all even if I always wished for this feature.
    Well, I learn stuff like that from sites like this. Thanks! :)

  3. Heather

    I wanted to use this on a recent website I made to save the client uploading heavy PNGs. But it doesn’t work in Edge or IE so had to remove it :(

    • I usually save between 50-80% of filesize by using http://tinypng.com to optimize my pngs. You should give it a go, it works wonders.

  4. Divyateja

    Hi! Any idea of how we do it in react-native?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!