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”
Collection of Pens Discussed in CodePen Radio 406
Time Jumps
- 00:06 406
- 00:31 Circling back to Marie
- 03:00 CSS is so cool right now
- 08:20 Clip path shapes
- 17:22 Liquid Glass is trending now
- 21:28 Glitching and datamoshing styles
- 24:48 Classic holographic textures
- 26:26 Grainy textures
- 30:03 AI is affecting trends on CodePen
- 37:53 4 hot pens from this year so far
