Why Are We Still Downloading 200KB SVGs for Simple Grids?
Grab a cup of coffee and let’s talk about a recurring nightmare in frontend development. Your designer hands you a Figma file. You open it up, and there it is: a gorgeous, retro-futuristic grid background, or maybe some sleek diagonal stripes behind a hero section.
Your first instinct might be to export it as an SVG, or worse, a PNG. But then you remember the performance budget, scaling issues on ultra-wide screens, and the pain of changing the color theme dynamically. What if I told you that we can draw almost any repeating pattern—stripes, dots, grids, and even complex checkerboards—using nothing but CSS gradients?
Today, we are going to master the art of background gradients. We will move past simple color transitions and learn how to construct complex, high-performance visual patterns directly in our stylesheets.
How We Suffered Before (The Dark Age of Repeating Tiles)
