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performanceRauno

Avoid Gradient Banding

SHOULD

SHOULD: Build soft glows with `radial-gradient()` rather than a filled rectangle scaled and run through `filter: blur()` — the blur+scale route bands. Where a gradient still bands, fade it with a `mask-image` gradient instead of stacking more blur.

Scaling and blurring filled rectangles causes banding — use radial gradients instead

.glow { background: radial-gradient(circle, oklch(0.7 0.2 250 / 0.5), transparent 70%); }

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Applying blur() and scale() to solid-colored elements produces visible color banding artifacts. Radial gradients create smooth color transitions natively without needing blur filters, resulting in better visual quality and performance.

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.