406: Hot Trends of 2025

CodePen Radio

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