Box Shadow Generator

How to Use the Free Client-Side Box Shadow Generator

A good shadow is several coordinated values, and stacking multiple layers multiplies the fiddliness. This generator keeps every layer visible and tunable:

1. Use the sliders to set horizontal offset, vertical offset, blur radius, spread, and shadow color.
2. Click 'Add Layer' to stack multiple shadows for more complex effects like realistic depth.
3. Once satisfied, click the copy button to grab the box-shadow CSS property.

When to Use Box Shadow Generator

Depth in an interface is communicated almost entirely through shadows: a card that floats, a modal that sits above the page, a button that responds to a hover. Designers adding elevation to UI cards and modals, developers creating glow effects for focus states and active elements, and teams building material-style interfaces with layered elevation will spend most of their time here.

The editor exposes the full vocabulary of box-shadow: offset X, offset Y, blur, spread, and color, all through sliders and a color picker. The multi-layer support is what lets you move past flat drop shadows into something closer to reality, combining a tight shadow close to the element with a wider, softer one farther away. Starting presets cover material, glow, inset, and soft shadows, and the inset toggle flips a shadow inside the border for that pressed or engraved look that suits form inputs and active button states.

Box Shadow Generator Tips and Best Practices

1. Layer two or three shadows with different offsets and blurs for natural depth, mixing a tight close shadow with a wider, softer one.
2. Use inset shadows for inner depth on form inputs and active button states.
3. Keep blur moderate. Large radii of 50px or more tend to wash shadows out; most UI elements look cleanest between 4 and 20px.
4. Watch performance. Multiple shadow layers can slow rendering, especially under animation, so limit to 2-3 layers and avoid animating every property at once.

Why Client-Side Privacy Matters for designing elevation and interactive states for unreleased applications

A shadow style reveals a design language as clearly as a color does, and the components being designed are often part of an unreleased application. Uploading CSS experiments to a generator that stores them exposes the visual direction of a product that has not shipped.

This generator produces every shadow locally in your browser. The sliders, layers, and presets you manipulate generate CSS on your device alone, so interaction designs and pre-release interface states never leave your machine.