Here's the first trick for cohesive shadows: every shadow on the page should share the same ratio. In the image above, for example, the resulting shadow has a 4px vertical offset and a 2px horizontal offset. Instead, we shift the shadow around by specifying a horizontal offset and a vertical offset. If CSS had a real lighting system, we would specify a position for one or more lights. It's common for that light source to be above and slightly to the left: In general, we should decide on a single light source for all elements on the page. The direction of the shadows depends on the position of the light: In the natural world, shadows are cast from a light source. Otherwise, it just looks like a bunch of blurry borders: If our goal is to create the illusion of depth, we need each and every shadow to match. Here's the problem: by creating each shadow in isolation like this, you'll wind up with a mess of incongruous shadows. When I wanted an element to have a shadow, I'd add the box-shadow property and tinker with the numbers until I liked the look of the result. Link to this headingCreating a consistent environmentįor a long time, I didn't really use shadows correctly □. In order to achieve these goals, though, we need to take a holistic view of the shadows in our application. Either I want to increase the prominence of a specific element, or I want to make my application feel more tactile and life-like. When I use shadows, I do it with one of these purposes in mind. We can use elevation as a tool to direct attention. Our attention tends to be drawn to the elements closest to us, and so by elevating the dialog box, we make it more likely that the user focuses on it first. By using different shadows on the header and dialog box, we create the impression that the dialog box is closer to us than the header is. There's also a tactical benefit here as well. I want the applications I build to feel tactile and genuine, as if the browser is a window into a different world. Drag the "Reveal" slider to see what I mean: If we use shadows strategically, we can create the illusion of depth, as if different elements on the page are floating above the background at different levels. Shadows imply elevation, and bigger shadows imply more elevation. But first, I wanna take a step back and talk about why shadows exist in CSS, and how we can use them to maximum effect. We'll get to the fun CSS trickery soon, I promise. If Affinity were to implement this feature, each subsequent shadow must be the shadow of the original object only, ignoring any existance of other shadows and not adding them in the total shading, reducing resources and making it more pretty.Link to this headingWhy even use shadows? They "allow" you to add multiple shadows, but what they really are doing is they are adding a shadow to a grouping of the object+previous shadow, so its ugly. Then you have to use symbols, for example, which might be a solution, but at this point you are changing your workflow too much to accommodate somebody's lacking features and you might as well just run Photoshop.īut it must be said, Illustrator sucks at this. Shadowing a shadow is resource intensive as well.Ī real solution to all this is to duplicate an object, where you set "fill" to 0 and apply different shadows, but then you cant edit it. In reality, I need to add a shape+shape's shadow+shape's shadow+shape's shadow, not shape+shadow+shadow of shape and shadow, etc. Plus, a huge issue arises where I'm not only adding an aditional drop shadow to my original content (let's say a shape), but I'm also drop shadowing my shape+drop shadow, and the next round I'm adding a drop shadow to the shape+shadow+shadow, where things may start to get a little bit ugly. Group the layer (you can group a single layer). Add the Drop Shadow to the object on a layer.
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