This UI Engineer Makes Stunning Digital Art Entirely From HTML & CSS Code

Web developers are losing their minds over Diana Smith’s work, and honestly, you should, too, because it brilliantly chronicles the history of the Internet in a way that hasn’t been done before.

I now stand seriously corrected about viewing my work in non-Chrome browsers. The results are so much more interesting than I could've tried to achieve on purpose. https://t.co/g0oa5znU58

— Diana Smith (@cyanharlow) May 1, 2018

Smith created an elaborate image called “Pure CSS Francine” online, and it’s not at all like an image you’d click on to save. The only way to archive it is to make a screenshot of it. And it looks the same every time you do so. Why? How? Francine is made entirely with CSS (cascading style sheets), which is used to create web pages. If you’re adept with code-writing, which Smith apparently is, you can do much more than that, too.

More: Diana Smith, GitHub h/t: papermag

Creating images with CSS involves writing HTML code to display an object in a web browser. From there, you can modify the code to manipulate its size dimensions, color, shape, and more.

i tried @cyanharlow's incredible pure css portrait in an old version of opera and well, the disclaimer wasn't lying: "so the live preview will most likely look laughable in anything other than chrome"https://t.co/fReKS0yCLz pic.twitter.com/MdPLNApQ2g

— David Zhou (@dz) May 1, 2018

CSS image creation is essentially a process of layering and arranging shapes. But since the process is done entirely with a keyboard (no mouse! no touchscreen! no pre-made filter!), you can’t really check how the image is shaping up as you go.