How to make a transparent glass menu bar with CSS3

Thanks to CSS3, our design and development options have grown a lot. In this tutorial I will how you how to make a transparent glass menu bar with CSS3.

The demo can be seen below.

See the Pen Colorful glass menu concept by Creative Punch (@CreativePunch) on CodePen.

For this demo, I wanted to have a background with some variation. I used a colorful gradient for this, but you could also use a nice image. A flat color as background would not look as good with a glass menu.

I made use of a CSS reset, and prefix-free

The HTML for the glass menu bar

The CSS for our glass menu bar will be much the same as with any menu bar. We will place a nav tag, containing an u list with links.

<nav>
  <ul>
    <li>
      <a href="#">Home</a>
    </li>
    <li>
      <a href="#">Blog</a>
    <li>
      <a href="#">About</a>
    </li>
    <li>
      <a href="#">Contact</a>
    </li>
  </ul>
</nav>

The CSS for the glass menu bar

The CSS for the glass menu bar is really simple, but uses a few nice CSS3 features!

nav {
  max-width: 960px;
  mask-image: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) 0%, #ffffff 25%, #ffffff 75%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) 100%);
  margin: 0 auto;
  padding: 50px 0;
}

nav ul {
  text-align: center;
  background: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) 0%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2) 25%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2) 75%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) 100%);
  width: 100%;
  box-shadow: 0 0 25px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), inset 0 0 1px rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.6);
}

nav ul li {
  display: inline-block;
}

nav ul li a {
  padding: 20px;
  font-family: "Roboto";
  color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
  text-shadow: 1px 1px 1px rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.4);
  font-size: 25px;
  text-decoration: none;
  display: block;
}

nav ul li a:hover {
  box-shadow: 0 0 10px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), inset 0 0 1px rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.6);
  background: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.1);
  color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
}

Let’s look at some of this in a bit more detail.

nav ul {
  text-align: center;
  background: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) 0%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2) 25%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2) 75%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) 100%);
  width: 100%;
  box-shadow: 0 0 25px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), inset 0 0 1px rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.6);
}

I styled the ul tag with a background gradient that is white and transparent. I also added a two box-shadow values, one for an outer, dark shadow and one for an inner, light edge. Sadly the box-shadow’s sides don’t fade into the background like the gradient does. Luckily we can solve this by using the mask-image property. We apply this property on the parent element (in this case the nav). We do this so that we can apply a padding to the top and bottom. If we don’t do this, our shadows will get cut off by the mask.

nav {
  max-width: 960px;
  /* The mask-image gives us some extra fading. It is not necessary but without this, you can't face out the box-shadows. This clips our menu */
  mask-image: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) 0%, #ffffff 25%, #ffffff 75%, rgba(255, 255, 255, 0) 100%);
  margin: 0 auto;
  /* Using padding instead of margin for the top and bottom here will keep our box-shadow visible and not affected by the mask-image */
  padding: 50px 0;
}

We also use the same gradient technique for the hover event, only rotated by 90 degrees like this:

nav ul li a:hover {
  box-shadow: 0 0 10px rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1), inset 0 0 1px rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.6);
  background: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.1);
  color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7);
}

This adds an extra “overlay” of glass when you hover over a menu item.

That’s pretty much all there is to it! I hope this inspires you to create some beautiful glass menus.

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