Background Style

Learn how to use different background colors and shadows.

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Background color

Tailwind’s background color is similar to text color and border color—the pattern is .bg-{color} with the same color names the other groups use, such as .bg-red-700 or .bg-orange-300. Tailwind also provides .bg-opacity-{level} that follows the same steps as text opacity.

Shadows

A box-shadow is technically not a background color, but it’s used like one. Tailwind provides a few utilities to manage the box-shadow. The base utility, .shadow, effectively creates a 3-pixel wide, 10% opacity black border that’s vertically offset by 1-pixel vertically. We can then make that smaller with the xs and sm modifiers, or bigger with themd, lg, xl, and 2xl modifiers. For example, we can write .shadow- sm, .shadow-xl, and so on.

We can have a small inset shadow with the .shadow-inner class, which makes the element look like it’s lower than the rest of the screen. There are no size variants. We can cancel all of these with .shadow-none. As we can see in the following example, it’s a pretty subtle effect unless we make it large:

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