Text Shadows

Follow this guide to learn how to add a text shadow to a website using the text-shadow CSS property!

Setup

Follow these steps to set up a new project for text shadows.

1. Click here to go to the Starter project
2. Open the index.html file for editing
3. Add a class attribute to the second <p> element that says "Style this paragraph..."
4. Set the class to be update
5. Find the <style></style> element
6. Create a new ruleset to style the paragraph by its class
   • Use .update as the selector
   • After the selector, add curly brackets ({ and })

At this point, the added code should look something like this:

HTML

<p class="update">Style this paragraph...</p>

CSS

.update {

}

The project should be ready for styling.

Adding the Shadow

The cool thing about the text-shadow property is that there are a ton of different possibilities. You can control the color, location, and blur of the shadow!

Example

It looks something like this:

text-shadow: 1px 4px 8px blue;

Here is what each item does:

• h-shadow (1px in the example): position of the horizontal shadow
• v-shadow (4px in the example): position of the vertical shadow
• blur-radius (8px in the example): how much to blur the shadow
• color (blue in the example): the color the shadow should be

Adding the property example above to a piece of text would make it look like this:

Updating the Project

Now, put some of that code in the Glitch project.

1. Open the index.html file for editing, and find the <style></style> element
2. In the .update ruleset (between { and }), create a new property declaration with text-shadow
3. Set the value for the text-shadow property to be 1px 4px 8px blue

Load up the page, and see the shadow appear! The code within the <style></style> element should look something like this:

.update {
  text-shadow: 1px 4px 8px blue;
}

Try playing around with the different values to see where it leads.

Click here for an interactive text-shadow generator tool! This site will allow you play around with the values, and will give you code to copy and paste at the end.