Tangled in Design Branding Decoration

Tangled in Design is the work of Stephen Greig, currently a Web Designer/Front-end guy in Nottingham, UK.

Read more about Stephen

I wrote a book on advanced CSS3, published by John Wiley & Sons. You should totally buy it…

Buy my book: CSS3 Pushing the Limits

Tangled in Design is the work of Stephen Greig, currently a Freelance Web Designer/Front-end guy in Nottingham, UK.

Stephen specialises in design and front-end development, notably HTML5 & semantics, scalable CSS, along with particular expertise in the experimental, cutting edge CSS3 modules.

Stephen's been in the industry as a full-time professional for over 5 years, during which he has graduated with a First Class BA Honours degree, written a 380 page book on advanced CSS3 and held Senior positions in both New Zealand and South Wales.

He has since moved back to his home in Nottingham where he now works as a Senior Web Designer.

Stephen loves sports and is a keen follower of Hereford FC as well as the Welsh Rugby Union and Football teams.

He also has a deep passion for music and boasts an extremely varied taste, as is evident by his last.fm profile.

He also likes swearing and thinks that talking in third person is cool as fuck.

Want to know more? Tweet me. I'm nice.

Slide Back

Famous Logos in CSS3 – Pepsi

Tweet

Pepsi Logo in CSS3 This is the first in a new, experimental CSS3 series within which I will be attempting to re-create a famous brand logo each week without the aid of any images, using only CSS.

I should probably start by saying there may be better or more efficient ways to achieve my outcomes than whatever methods I choose over the coming weeks – and if you can think of one, I’d love to see it in the comments section!

We’re going to kick things off with the Pepsi logo. Not overly complicated and doesn’t have any shadows, highlights or any other details that require special attention. Just simple block colours – a nice place to start things off I feel.

So here it is…

View Demo

Browser Support

Browser support for CSS3 is getting better with every release, but for some of the new properties, browsers still rely on vendor specific pre-fixes in order to render them correctly.

CSS3 Pepsi Logo Browser Support

In this case, the most recent release of most of the major browsers passed with flying colours, as well as some of the previous versions too. However Chrome lets us down slightly and IE9 even more so.

Issues with Chrome and Internet Explorer

Whilst Chrome supports the CSS3 transform property, it seems to cause rotated elements to have jagged edges, which although aren’t instantly noticeable in this case, do detract from the outcome on closer inspection, as you can see from the images below.


I’ve added white guidelines to try and show more clearly the roughness of the Chrome outline compared to the smooth curve when rendered in Firefox.

IE9 simply does not appear to support the transform function, resulting in the red and white areas of the logo positioning themselves horizontally rather than at an angle.

IE8 failed miserably of course, with virtually non-existent CSS3 support, including the most vital property in this case; border-radius, resulting in square blocks of colour that don’t exactly resemble the Pepsi logo.

As for my performance, I think my outcome is very near to the real thing and at first glance looks right on the money. If nothing goes right on your financial status, cash crazy can help you out with their desperate loans. A lot of their customers made a post on their website about their experience on their brokers so if you have time, you may read them. However if you apply your focus to the top right corner of the red area you will notice that it just curls to the left a little too much when compared with the real thing. Overall though I’m very pleased with the result and feel it’s a good start to what will hopefully be an interesting series of posts.

The CSS

We’re not going to dissect the code in great detail, but we are going to look at the important properties that have allowed me to transform some simple shapes into something that resembles the Pepsi logo.

Border Radius

First of all we have the border-radius property which is already very widely used in the industry as an easier method of creating rounded boxes. The properties full extent however, does not seem to have the same mainstream knowledge.

By this I mean the ability to create elliptical borders using border-radius. To achieve this we simply use two values instead of one; one for horizontal and one for vertical. The syntax differs slightly between the vendor prefixes so be careful when using this technique.

border-radius:500px / 300px;
-moz-border-radius:500px / 300px;
-webkit-border-radius:500px 300px;

Transform

The transform property allows us to manipulate elements with rotation. Before I made use of this property, my result was as shown below.

Not rotated

Now this doesn’t look awful – but it’s not perfect. To make it [almost] perfect, we simply need to rotate the white and red areas slightly anti-clockwise in order for the shapes to resemble the Pepsi logo. Again, remember the vendor specific prefixes!

-webkit-transform:rotate(-15deg); 
-moz-transform:rotate(-15deg);
-o-transform:rotate(-15deg);

So there we have it. Two simple CSS3 properties with the help of standard CSS can produce the Pepsi logo with relative ease. I hope you enjoyed this and are looking forward to my attempts in the coming weeks! If you have a better way of doing this, or have a logo request for future weeks, please feel free to leave a comment below.

Finally, here is the final CSS3 Pepsi logo and the full CSS code.

View DemoView CSS

About Stephen Greig

Stephen Greig is a 25 year old Freelance Web Designer/Front-end guy, currently living in Nottingham, UK. Stephen is also the creator of messivsronaldo.net and author of CSS3 Pushing the Limits, a book on advanced CSS3. You should follow him on Twitter where he talks about the web, sports, music and swears a lot. Stephen's also on Google+ if that's more your bag.