Persistent Shadows

This article, part of the writing collection, was published on .

How easy is it to keep a shadow's direction consistent whilst rotating an element?

Nearing the end of the work-day yesterday, I was struck with an idea. Having recently read through Google’s Visual Assets Guidelines on Behance and stumbling upon this awesome CodePen (actually a fork of Lionel’s, from Italy: https://codepen.io/elrumordelaluz/pen/dobAz):

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My idea was as such: I wonder if I could create something similar to the clock above using CSS3 and maintain a persistent light source. The trouble with the usual approach is that in using transform on an element, you are manipulating it’s top, right, bottom, and left attributes as you see them. If you transform: rotate3d(0, 0, 1, 90deg); a box, what you now see as the top of the box is in fact it’s left attribute. These shadow effects are typically done with box-shadow, and as the element rotates, the shadow will rotate with the element—box-shadow: 2em 2em 0 black; would produce a diagonal bottom-right shadow with no transform, but with transform: rotate3d(0, 0, 1, 90deg); it would become a diagonal bottom-left shadow…

We’ve hit a snag!

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How does that work?

Well, maybe if we’re animateing an element (or pseudo element) and manipulating its transform attribute, we can also change the box-shadow property at the same rate. Using the same example as above, if we say that when the box has the rule transform: rotate3d(0, 0, 1, 90deg);, it should also have box-shadow: 2em -2em 0 black;, which puts a shadow on the top-right of the box, which appears to be the bottom-right, as desired. Now, by switching from a 0-degree rotation to a 90-degree rotation at the same speed as we change from a bottom-right to a top-right shadow (and continuing this pattern for the full 360-degree rotation), our effect is be complete!

It may be interesting to note that as the medium we’re working with is composed of boxes, we need to add a point in our animation for every corner in our rotation—since we are going a full 360-degrees, we need four defined points, not including the 0% and 100% duplicates.

What else is there?

What else do you think we could do with an effect like this? I think it could do from some simplification, and I wonder if there’s a solution more basic than this. If you know, let me know in the comments, or send me a pen!

A little something-something extra, just for you

Firstly, a CSS3 checkbox. Uses an invisible <input type="checkbox"> field and an :after attribute to toggle the style of the checkbox.

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And secondly, here’s a gimmicky mockup I made as a joke to demonstrate to a friend at work that converting from left-to-right to right-to-left text was a piece of cake.

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