How to do gradient text with Tailwind CSS

In Tailwind CSS v3, gradient text has become a lot easier, here’s how to do it.

Step 1: Add your gradient styles

<h1 class="bg-gradient-to-r from-blue-600 via-green-500 to-indigo-400">
	hello world
</h1>

Here are the official docs on how to work with gradients in Tailwind but to break it down:

• bg-gradient-to-r creates the gradient and makes it from left to right
• from-blue-600 sets our starting color, which will go on the left
• via-green-500 sets our middle color, which is optional
• to-indigo-400 sets our ending color, which will go on the right and can be optional if you want the end to be transparent

You can change these values to whatever suit your use case but this is the most common structure for working with gradients in Tailwind CSS

Optional but recommended

At this point, you may have noticed an issue with your code: if your text is short enough and you resize your window to a lower width, the text will move over the gradient colors.

This will cause an issue when you have the finished gradient text code. When you resize your window, the gradient colors in your text will change.

This is because the gradient we created takes up the full width of the element instead of the width of the text.

To fix this, all we need to do is add the inline-block class to our element.

<h1 class="... inline-block">
	hello world
</h1>

Now, the gradient takes up only the width of the text, instead of the width of the parent element.

Problem solved! Now, let’s move on to the next step.

Step 2: Make your text transparent

Make your text transparent using the text-transparent class.

<h1 class="... text-transparent">
	hello world
</h1>

The text will disappear but don’t worry, we’ll fix that in the next step.

Step 3: Clip the text to the background

This is the most important thing for making gradient text, it uses the background-clip CSS property, which has multiple values and one of them is text, to use that specific property and value in Tailwind CSS we just need to add the bg-clip-text class.

<h1 class="... bg-clip-text">
	hello world
</h1>

That’s it! We now have our gradient text 🥳

Putting it all together you get this snippet:

<h1 class="bg-gradient-to-r from-blue-600 via-green-500 to-indigo-400 inline-block text-transparent bg-clip-text">hello world</h1>

Here’s the Tailwind Play link if you want to play around with it.

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That’s it for this one! I hope you learned how to make gradient text with Tailwind CSS and how to take into account how the width of the text changes the gradient colors and how to fix it.