406: Hot Trends of 2025

Marie and Chris jump on to discuss some of the trends of what people are building on CodePen here, approximately halfway through 2025.

New CSS!

• Custom @functions (just landed)
• if() function
• clip-path & shape()
• corner-shape and the superellipse
• Scrolling stuff
• The attr() power up

Hot Styles

• Liquid glass (Jhey's demo, Spark)
• Hard glitch (CRT-like effect with VFX-JS, Glitchy button hover effect with VFX-JS, ❍ Cinematic Glitch Slideshow)
• Holographics (CSS Holographic Masks)
• Grainy textures (Grainy distorted interactive 1 gradient blobs)
• Innovative blurs (wavy wobbly lava orb, Bubbles Background Animation)
• New color spaces (OKLCH Swatch Example, CSS Color Functions, CSS oklch Gradation)

Hot Pens

• Petr Knoll’s Glass Button (From February, well ahead of liquid glass)
• Mike Bespalov’s Monospace ASCII art generator (known to be “vibe coded”)
• Adam Kuhn’s Severance Lumon Macrodata Refinement
• Steve Gardner’s “Who Needs Shaders”

Time Jumps