CSS 3 is full of ways to reduce our dependence on background images, one of which is pure CSS gradients. They have several features, which I’m sure designers are salivating over, like multiple color stops, and angled, radial, and linear gradients. Many people had built cool designer-focused tools to make interacting with a somewhat confusing gradient syntax a little easier. The issue for me has been that I’m not a designer. I generally work off of photoshop comps or (when doing big re-architecture projects) the site itself, as if the old version were a design. This means that, for the most part, I was trying desperately to match CSS gradients to an image with zero information about how that image would have been created. Because of my focus on fixing old and broken CSS, the original designer may not even still work at the company.
If you don’t know what I mean, picture me with a color picker going pixel by pixel to try to figure out by hand where the color stops should be and what colors I should use versus extrapolate. Then, for each version, making an image of the gradient I’ve created, blowing it up so I can compare it to the image of the original. Rinse, repeat until I’ve come up with something that kinda, sorta approximates the original. Oh yeah, painful.
