See The Artwork This Programmer Has Created With Pure CSS

The sheer creativity of bored programmers can be an amazing thing sometimes. In this case, an artist named Diana Smith has demonstrated multiple times how artistic limitation can provide some dramatic results.

In this case, Smith elected to create art in the 18th-century portrait style using nothing but hand-typed code in CSS. The result is astounding ... as long as it's viewed in Google Chrome browser, which is what she codes for. Any seasoned CSS web developer knows that certain elements only work in some browsers, making it necessary to provide more code to compensate. Smith cared only for her medium in Chrome, providing some hilarious Cubism-looking results when her work is viewed in Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Viewing the work in Safari makes the eyes into rectangles, which is an odd sort of artistic license that only a programmer could figure out.

Her work is completely open source, so the code is available on her GitHub. Naturally, this has led some people to experiment with the work. For example, one individual found that deleting a few CSS nodes leads to something that looks a little more surrealist. In another, a user demonstrates how easy it is to create a parody of the work by adjusting a few lines of code. In another example, a user showed what would happen to the art if some of it were animated, in this case, the woman's head. While humorous, this demonstrates some serious possibilities when it comes to the complexity of modern CSS.

This work, called "Francine," is part of a series called Pure CSS in which Smith is creating more art only using hand code.

There are two other works like this available on Smith's GitHub profile page. One, called "Zigario," is a French poster-style image of a woman smoking a cigarette. Another, called "Vignes," is a similar poster depicting some fruit. For more information click here https://github.com/cyanharlow/purecss-francine.