Micro Trend: Non-Rectangular Headers

I love techniques that allow designers and developers to “break” the boxed in nature of web design in a general sense. As a micro trend, non-rectangular headers have become one of my favorite techniques to accomplish this ask.

So, how do I do this?

Per CSS-Tricks, there are several methods available to accomplish this particular task:

1. Background images, which appears to be one of the weaker methods
2. Inline svgs, which can be modified pretty well, and reduce the load on the browser
3. border-radius, which allows for the more convex circular look
4. clip-path, which appears to have browser compatibility issues
5. And my favorite, transform: skew

As mentioned above, my preference in this case is transform: skew, although it introduces extraneous elements to the page–a seemingly forgotten rule is to not do so for presentational purposes–but this can certainly be accomplished with pseudo elements.

See the Pen Trapezoid Header Using Transform: SkewY by Erik Kennedy (@erikdkennedy) on CodePen.

The article referenced above uses an extra element in the document to create the effect–which is perfectly reasonable–as does the stripe website.

Stripe’s homepage design uses this method, and even more brilliantly, they include a few children spans (each is a block of color) that get skewed with the parent element, creating a more complex and colorful effect.

I don’t entirely know that I like the extra elements, but I come from a slightly different era of development that saw this technique of creating decoration-only elements as heresy, while still using it regularly.

Anyway, I enjoy looking at the sorts of things that front end devs do to accomplish what UX/UI designers come up with.