The text-shadow property can be used for many purposes in web page design: I’ve demonstrated stroked text, 3D effects, and more. It’s logical to take the multi-shadows aspect of text-shadow even further, into effects like neon glows.

While there are a few lessons of this kind available on the web, most of them use a thick font with a diffuse glow of solid colors. Here we want to simulate a real neon sign, so I will use a thin rounded display font (the appropriately named Neon 80’s by Essqué Productions) and a little more subtlety on the colors.

First I needed to convert the font into webfont formats (via FontSquirrel) and embed it onto the page:

@font-face {
	font-family: 'Neon80sRegular';
	src: url('neon-webfont.woff') format('woff'),
         url('neon-webfont.ttf') format('truetype');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
}

The HTML is a simple <h1> element with the word “Diner”. The black brick texture behind it is from Photos Public Domain, licensed under Creative Commons. The CSS:

h1 { 
	background: #000;
	background-image:
		radial-gradient(center, ellipse farthest-corner, rgba(0,0,0,0), rgba(0,0,0,1)), 
		url(/assets/images/black-brick-wall-texture.jpg);
		width: 768px;
		text-align: center;
		font-family: Neon80sRegular, Arial Narrow, sans-serif;
		color: #fee;
		width: 768px;
		padding: 2rem;
		text-transform: uppercase;
		font-size: 6rem;
		letter-spacing: 2rem;
		text-shadow: 0 0 30px rgba(255,0,84,0.6),
			0 0 60px rgba(255,0,84,0.4),
			0 0 100px rgba(255,0,84,0.2),
			0 0 90px rgba(255,0,84,0.1);
}

I’ve used an elliptical gradient in the background of the <h1>, using a similar idea to my advanced CSS photo vignette technique to darken the bricks around the text. (I’ve covered gradients in Webkit-based browsers and Firefox in the code above, with a catch-all at the end; if you were using this in real-life, full CSS vendor support should be present).

The part that creates the neon glow is the multi-layered text-shadow. Note that none of the applied shadows have any kind of offset (the first two values for each shadow are always left at 0), but they do increase in blurriness (the third value). All of the shadows are the same color, set using rgba, but they decrease in opacity as they grow, approximating the inverse square law that all light obeys and enabling the viewer to glimpse the bricks through the neon glow.

If you’re inspired to recreate this effect I’d encourage you take the idea and  experiment with your own values, rather than copying what you see here. It’s also possible to make the neon flicker by using CSS keyframe animation.

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Check out the CodePen demo for this article at https://codepen.io/dudleystorey/pen/xJkhG