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
    How to Create a Twitter Card

    One of my favorite social APIs was the Open Graph API adopted by Facebook.  Adding just a few META tags to each page allowed links to my article to be styled and presented the way I wanted them to, giving me a bit of control...

  • By
    CSS vs. JS Animation: Which is Faster?

    How is it possible that JavaScript-based animation has secretly always been as fast — or faster — than CSS transitions? And, how is it possible that Adobe and Google consistently release media-rich mobile sites that rival the performance of native apps? This article serves as a point-by-point...

Incredible Demos

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!