Today I wanted to mess around with creating a wave effect, you know, the kind you see in those fancy UI designs. I’ve seen it done a bunch of times, but never actually tried it myself. So, I figured, why not give it a shot?
First, I needed something to apply the wave to. I just grabbed a simple, plain-colored container – nothing special, just something to hold the wave. I could have used an image, but a solid color seemed easier to start with.
Next up, I needed to figure out how to actually make the wave. I remembered seeing something about using SVGs for this, so I started poking around. Turns out, there are these things called “Bézier curves” that are perfect for creating smooth, curvy shapes. I’ve heard the name before, but never really dug into them.
I found a few online tools that let you play with Bézier curves and generate SVG code. That was super helpful! I messed around with the control points, trying to get a nice, wave-like shape. It took a bit of fiddling, but I eventually got something I liked.
Once I had my SVG wave, I needed to get it into my container. I initially thought about using it as a background image, but that felt a little clunky. Then I remembered about the `clip-path` CSS property. This seemed like a much cleaner way to do it.
So, I copied the path data from my SVG and pasted it into the `clip-path` property of my container. And… boom! There it was, a nice, clean wave cutting across my container. It was surprisingly easy, once I figured out the right tools.
But it was static. It didn’t move. So the next challenge was animation. I knew I could animate the `clip-path` itself, but that seemed complicated. I wanted something simpler.
I decided to try animating the `background-position` of the container instead. I duplicated my wave SVG a couple of times and stitched them together to make a longer, repeating wave pattern. I set that as the background, and then used a simple CSS animation to move the `background-position` horizontally.
It worked! It wasn’t perfect, the looping was a little noticeable, but it definitely gave the illusion of a moving wave. I played around with the animation speed and the size of the background image until it looked pretty smooth.
Here’s a rough breakdown of the steps I took:
- Created a container: Just a simple div with a background color.
- Generated an SVG wave: Used an online Bézier curve tool.
- Applied the wave with `clip-path` Copied the SVG path data.
- Created a repeating wave background: Duplicated the SVG a few times.
- Animated the `background-position`: Used a simple CSS animation.
It was a fun little experiment! It definitely gave me a better understanding of Bézier curves and how to use `clip-path` for some cool effects. There’s still plenty of room for improvement – I’d like to make the animation smoother and maybe even add some subtle color variations – but it was a good starting point.