Creating an animated text gradient with Tailwind CSS (and vanilla CSS)

Note: This article was originally published on my personal blog. For more updates, follow me on Twitter @ibelick.

Text gradients have become increasingly popular in modern web design, giving websites a fresh and dynamic look. One excellent example of this trend is Apple's iPhone 14 landing page, where they showcase a stunning animated text gradient.

Vanilla CSS

<span>hello, animated text gradient</span>

span {
  background: radial-gradient(
    circle at 100%,
    #b2a8fd,
    #8678f9 50%,
    #c7d2fe 75%,
    #9a8dfd 75%
  );
  font-weight: 600;
  background-size: 200% auto;
  color: #000;
  background-clip: text;
  -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent;
  animation: animatedTextGradient 1.5s linear infinite;
}

@keyframes animatedTextGradient {
  to {
    background-position: 200% center;
  }
}

What we do here is:

• background: radial-gradient(...): Creates a radial gradient with a circle at 100%, using the specified color stops.
• background-size: 200% auto: Sets the background size to 200% width and automatically adjusts the height.
• background-clip: text: Clips the background to the text content.
• -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent: Makes the text fill transparent (for webkit-based browsers).
• animation: animatedTextGradient 1s linear infinite: Applies the animatedTextGradient animation with a duration of 1s, a linear timing function, and infinite repetition.
• @keyframes rule defines the animatedTextGradient animation, which animates the background position from its initial value to 200% center, creating a smooth gradient movement effect.

Tailwind CSS

If you prefer using Tailwind CSS, here's the equivalent code written with React:

module.exports = {
  theme: {
    extend: {
      animation: {
        "text-gradient": "text 1.5s linear infinite",
      },
      keyframes: {
        text: {
          to: {
            backgroundPosition: "200% center",
          },
        },
      },
    },
  }

Then we use our animate-text-gradient, we use a background image with a linear gradient with the same color stops as the previous example, and we set the background size to 200% auto, the background clip to text, and the text color to transparent.

export const AnimatedTextGradientTW: React.FC = () => {
  return (
    <span
      className="animate-text-gradient bg-gradient-to-r from-[#b2a8fd] via-[#8678f9] to-[#c7d2fe] 
    bg-[200%_auto] bg-clip-text text-transparent"
    >
      hello, animated text gradient
    </span>
  );
};

Feel free to experiment and adapt the techniques discussed in this tutorial to fit your specific design needs and preferences.