Linear gradient is the new black

Build a wheel of fortune in CSS… is that even possible!? I had never thought about it until I met a group of entrepreneurs who were building a savings application based on video games. They were using React Native and a couple of graphics libraries which, in my opinion, seemed to be too much overhead for just a roulette. I immediately started to dig in the internet and I found a way to implement it in pure CSS3 and HTML. The CSS property that makes it possible? Meet your new best friend: linear-gradient 🕶️

So the problem is simple; a wheel with some triangular tiles which is able to spin on its center. Ideally the wheel could display any number of tiles but we have to start somewhere so let’s say we are happy with 8. We are aiming for a wheel like the following one:

Now, for the sake of simplicity, let’s see first how a 4-tile wheel can be implemented with some absolute positioning and css transformations. We will have one 300x300px “wheel” div container and four 150x150px “tile” div elements inside. Each of the “tile” elements will have absolute positioning and will be rotated based on the wheel container center, so they are distributed along the entire “wheel” area:

Not bad! We next need to give the container some border radius in order to achieve the circular shape and to hide the overflowing contents so the absolute “tile” elements don’t break the circle. By adding some more rotation to the tiles content and painting the tiles background color, we get a pretty decent 4-tile roulette:

“So! What’s the fuzz with linear-gradient? It looks like the wheel is ready to spin.” Easy soldier. This approach works for 4-tile wheels, but let’s see what happens when we try to double up the number of tiles. For the sake of clarity, I’ll remove the border radius from the wheel, so it’s easier to understand what is going on:

Aha! A wild couple of problems appears. The more important one is the fact that the last tile (number 8) is displayed on top the first one (number 1). We could try to fix this by giving the first tile a greater z-index, but we will end up with the first tile covering the second and so on… Here is where linear-gradient comes into play 😁 Instead of having a plain background-color, each of the tiles will get half of the background colored with the value we want and the other half will be transparent.

This is how linear-gradient makes its magic. The first argument is optional and it can be used to apply a rotation to the background. The rest of arguments are a set of colors which will be used to fill the background. If no percentages are provided, the background will be filled with a gradient, in this case from #0082ff to transparent. By adding the percentages, we can make the gradient sharp (e.g. no shadow effect).

The second problem is the tiles content is misaligned. This happens because now the tiles can only use half of their total area (the other half is transparent and, at practice, it belongs to another tile) and it can easily be fixed by giving the tile contents div half the width of the tile itself. The only thing that is now missing is to bring back the border radius and to improve the styling a little bit. Put that in place and you will get the same wheel you saw in the beginning of the article 👌

And that’s all there is! Feeling up for a bit of challenge? Try to fit four more tiles to the wheel 🏆