How to Create Dynamic Backgrounds With the CSS Paint API

Create resolution-independent, variable backgrounds on the fly

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash.

Modern web applications are heavy on images. They are responsible for most of the bytes that are downloaded. By optimizing them, you can better leverage their performance. If you happen to use geometric shapes as background images, there is an alternative. You can use the CSS Paint API to generate backgrounds programmatically.

In this tutorial, we will explore its capabilities and look at how we can use it to create resolution-independent, dynamic backgrounds on the fly. This will be the output of this tutorial:

Setting Up the Project

Let’s start by creating a new index.html file and filling it up with the following:

There are a couple of things to note:

• On line 13, we load a…