The web is full of sites with clean lines, slick layouts, and smooth features, so much so that Mary Lou at Codrops thinks CSS developers need to have more fun and get a little "slopy".  She has a bunch of fun CSS techniques to prevent your site from looking like all the rest and today I'll show you three of my favorites (though I hope you'll choose something other than hot pink...).

 

Angled Shapes and Diagonal Lines

To create this effect, "even" elements were rotated -5 degrees and "odd" elements were rotated 5 degrees, and a negative top margin was added to get the odd elements in the right position:

.se-slope{
	margin: 0 -50px;
	transform-origin: left center;
}
.se-slope:nth-child(odd){
	background: #000;
	transform: rotate(5deg);
	margin-top: -200px;
	box-shadow: 0px -1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.4);
}
.se-slope:nth-child(even){
	background: #e90089;
	transform: rotate(-5deg);
	box-shadow: 0px 2px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.4) inset;
}

Stacked Menu with Size and Background Mouseover Changes

For this Stacked Menu feature, Mary Lou defined the style for the:

• list item
• link element
• single elements
• content elements wrapper

Mary Lou created the linear transition for the content elements and then set the font size and color change for the list elements on hover:

.ca-menu li:hover{
    border-color: #fff004;
    background: #000;
}
.ca-menu li:hover .ca-icon{
    color: #fff004;
    text-shadow: 0px 0px 1px #fff004;
    font-size: 50px;
}
.ca-menu li:hover .ca-main{
    color: #fff004;
    font-size: 14px;
}
.ca-menu li:hover .ca-sub{
    color: #fff;
    font-size: 30px;
}

 

CSS3 Lightbox

 
For this CSS3 Lightbox design, Mary Lou used an unordered list with each item containing a thumbnail and an overlay dvision for the larger image.  She made the title for each thumbnail invisible and added an opactiy transition on hover, using a radial gradient as the background:

.lb-album li > a span{
	position: absolute;
	width: 150px;
	height: 150px;
	top: 10px;
	left: 10px;
	text-align: center;
	line-height: 150px;
	color: rgba(27,54,81,0.8);
	text-shadow: 0px 1px 1px rgba(255,255,255,0.6);
	font-size: 24px;
	opacity: 0;
	background:
		radial-gradient(
			center,
			ellipse cover,
			rgba(255,255,255,0.56) 0%,
			rgba(241,210,194,1) 100%
		);
	transition: opacity 0.3s linear;
}
.lb-album li > a:hover span{
	opacity: 1;
}

Be sure to visit Codrops as Mary Lou has a plethora of great ideas for CSS3 design as well as more detail on each of these projects.