An experiment that uses pseudo-elements to create 84 simple GUI icons using CSS and semantic HTML. Shared as an exercise in creative problem solving and working within constraints. This is not a “production ready” CSS icon set.

Demo: Pure CSS GUI icons

Known support: Firefox 3.5+, Safari 5+, Chrome 5+, Opera 10.6+.

An exercise in constraint

Several months ago I was experimenting with the creation of common GUI icons with CSS. The HTML is very simple and it relies on CSS pseudo-elements rather than extraneous HTML elements. The technical aspects of this exercise might be of interest to others, so I’ve decided to share it.

Pseudo-elements provide many possibilities to developers interested in enhancing existing semantic HTML.

Example code

The technique behind this experiment is an expansion of the basic shape-creation that was used to make Pure CSS speech bubbles. Some of these GUI icons can only be created in browsers that support CSS3 transforms.

The HTML is a basic unordered list of links.

<ul>
  <li class="power"><a href="#non">Power</a></li>
  <li class="play"><a href="#non">Play</a></li>
  <li class="stop"><a href="#non">Stop</a></li>
  <li class="pause"><a href="#non">Pause</a></li>
</ul>

Each icon uses its own set of styles. For example, the key parts of the CSS responsible for the “expand” icon are as follows:

.expand a:before {
  content: "";
  position: absolute;
  top: 50%;
  left: 1px;
  width: 5px;
  height: 0;
  border-width: 7px 7px 0;
  border-style: solid;
  border-color: transparent #c55500;
  margin-top: -4px;
  /* css3 */
  -webkit-transform: rotate(-45deg);
  -moz-transform: rotate(-45deg);
  -o-transform: rotate(-45deg);
  transform: rotate(-45deg);
}

.expand a:after {
  content: "";
  position: absolute;
  top: 50%;
  left: 5px;
  width: 8px;
  height: 8px;
  border-width: 3px 0 0 3px;
  border-style: solid;
  border-color: #c55500;
  margin-top: -6px;
}

.expand a:hover:before,
.expand a:focus:before,
.expand a:active:before {
  border-color: transparent #730800;
}

.expand a:hover:after,
.expand a:focus:after,
.expand a:active:after {
  border-color: #730800;
}

The demo page contains a full set of user interaction and media player control icons, as well as other common icons. For now, several icons actually require more than one element as CSS 2.1 only specifies 2 pseudo-elements per element that can contain generated content. The CSS3 Generated and Replaced Content Module allows for an unlimited number of pseudo-elements but has yet to be fully implemented in any modern browser.