Developer builds CSS-only Indian tiffin box art to master rendering metal
A frontend developer created a pure CSS illustration of a traditional Indian dabba — a four-tiered steel tiffin carrier — as part of DEV Community's Frontend Challenge: Comfort Food Edition. The project used only divs, gradients, and shadows, with no SVG or images, making metal the central technical challenge. To simulate polished steel realistically, the developer used a 14-stop uneven linear gradient mimicking light reflections on a curved surface, combined with a horizontal grain layer to replicate the anisotropic quality of brushed steel. Each of the three tins was given a unique background position offset from a shared gradient to avoid the uniform, computer-generated look of identical reflections. The four food items — dal, rice, chapati, and sabzi — required multiple redesigns to remain legible within the narrow elliptical wells of each tin lid.
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