background-color

lets take a look at the background-color property

background-color is the CSS property that sets the color of your element’s background.

taught by Tina May

background-color can be set with CSS color names

You can use one of the 147 predefined CSS color names. The options are a bit limited, so you generally use this just for playing around with code.

background-color:

Tip: All 147 color names and visual examples can be seen here.

Oh hey there!

What's brewing, good looking?

You miss 100% of the shots you never take.

background-color can be set with HEX codes

You can use hexadecimal (HEX) color code, the universal six-digit code used to define over 16 million color options. Remember that it always begins with the # symbol.

background-color:

Tip: Each digit represents a value from 0 to 9 and A to F, and it accepts both uppercase and lowercase.

Oh hey there!

What's brewing, good looking?

You miss 100% of the shots you never take.

background-color can be set with RGB codes

You can use any rgb() color code, which represents red, green, and blue. Each of them can have a value between 0 to 255.

background-color:

Tip: Setting all three codes to the same value will give you shade of grey and you can increase/decrease this to make it lighter/darker, or tweak the tone slightly.

Oh hey there!

What's brewing, good looking?

You miss 100% of the shots you never take.

background-color can be set with HSL codes

The hsl() stands for Hue (represents the color wheel and accepts a value between 0 to 360); Saturation (the color intensity) and Lightness (the amount of white or black in the color).

background-color:

Tip: Both Saturation & Lightness accept a percentage value. 0% Saturation is full grayscale, while 100% is full color. 0% Lightness is full black, while 50% is balanced, and 100% is full white.

Oh hey there!

What's brewing, good looking?

You miss 100% of the shots you never take.

background-color can be added with transparency

We can use either rgba() or hsla() color codes. The a here stands for additional alpha channel that accepts a value between 0 (fully transparent) to 1 (fully non-transparent).

background-color:

Tip: The alpha channel accepts a value with an increment of two decimal places so you can control the transparency with greater detail.

Oh hey there!

What's brewing, good looking?

You miss 100% of the shots you never take.

explore all background properties

Select any property below and we’ll show you step-by-step how to use the property, with video demo, tips and practical examples you can code for yourself.

background-attachment

background-clip

background-color

background-image

background-origin

background-position

background-repeat

background-size

background

Try it for yourself

HTML

<div>
  <p class="style-1">Tuition is valuable. But you know what's invaluable? Intuition.</p>
  <p class="style-2">I know what to do. But in a much more real sense, I had no idea what to do.</p>
  <p class="style-3">You miss 100% of the shots you never take.</p>
</div>

Tuition is valuable. But you know what's invaluable? Intuition.

I know what to do. But in a much more real sense, I had no idea what to do.

You miss 100% of the shots you never take.

CSS

/* Change the background color of the first paragraph*/

.style-1 { padding: 40px 20px; border: 1px #513EC9; background-color: DarkOliveGreen; }

/* Change the background color of the second paragraph*/

.style-2 { padding: 40px 20px; border: 1px #513EC9; background-color: rgba(81, 62, 201, 0.75); }

/* Change the background color of the third paragraph*/

.style-3 { padding: 40px 20px; border: 1px #513EC9; background-color: #41414d; }

reults

Try changing the background color of each of the following elements. Below we’ve put three elements with some padding & margin so you can see the each one. 

Let’s test out what happens when you give their background a HEX, RGB or HSL values, or one of the 147 color names.

Try these (or anything else!):

Copyright 2023