My CSS Art Made Some Foodie Friends 🍙🧋🥟🍲

This is a submission for Frontend Challenge - Comfort Food Edition, CSS Art.

Inspiration

Comfort food isn't just one dish, so instead of picking one I built a whole squad — and gave them somewhere to live: a dark, neon-lit restaurant with a digital menu display. Onigiri, Boba Tea, Gyoza, and Hot Pot double as the menu items, each with a price tag, blinking and bouncing on a glowing CRT-style screen. Underneath, a touchscreen self-order kiosk — the kind you'd find at a fast-food counter — asks "Can I take your order?" and prints out a ticket with your order number.

Demo

Live demo: https://lanthanum89.github.io/dev.to-Frontend-Challenge-Comfort-Food-Edition/
Source: https://github.com/Lanthanum89/dev.to-Frontend-Challenge-Comfort-Food-Edition

Every character bounces on its own, blinking every few seconds — click one and it gets happy ^^ eyes plus a burst of sparkles, right there on the menu screen. Give the kiosk below a few seconds and watch it type out its prompt, pulse its order button, and print a receipt.

Journey

Everything is divs built with clip-path / border-radius + gradients and CSS animations, with a single small vanilla-JS click handler for the food characters (the challenge allows "a sprinkle of JavaScript," so I kept it to exactly one interaction and pushed everything else — including the kiosk's whole sequence — into pure CSS):

• Shared rig: every character is a .character wrapper with the same .face / .eye / .cheek / .mouth parts, the same infinite float bounce, the same blink timing, and the same squish + sparkle-burst reaction on click. Building this as one reusable system — instead of one-off pieces — is what made it possible to add multiple characters without the CSS ballooning out of control. Each character only overrides shape, color, and face position.
• Onigiri: a clip-path rounded triangle with a radial-gradient dot texture for rice grains and a separate nori-band trapezoid.
• Boba Tea: a tapered cup (clip-path polygon) with a striped straw, a domed lid, and tapioca pearls scattered along the bottom via absolutely-positioned circles.
• Gyoza: a squashed dome shape, seared with layered radial-gradients on the bottom half, and scalloped pleats along the top edge made from a repeating dot pattern.
• Hot Pot: a broth bowl split red/clear with a hard-edged linear-gradient, sitting in a separate metal "band" (with rivets) below it, ring handles on both sides, and a rising-steam animation.
• The restaurant scene: a flickering neon "COMFORT FOOD" sign (layered text-shadow glow + a subtle opacity @keyframes flicker), a screen bezel with a repeating-linear-gradient scanline overlay for that CRT feel, and a wood counter underneath.
• The self-order kiosk: entirely CSS-driven and timed with animation-delay so it plays out like a little sequence on page load — "Can I take your order?" types itself out letter by letter using the classic width: 0 → Nch + steps(N, end) typewriter trick (no JS, no per-letter markup), the "TAP TO ORDER" button pulses with an expanding-ring box-shadow plus a radial-gradient "ripple," and a receipt slides down and prints its order number one digit at a time, torn edge included via a repeating diagonal-gradient background.

The biggest lesson: getting the shared character mechanics right first (float, blink, squish, sparkle burst) meant each new food was mostly "draw a shape and drop it into the rig" — and having that solid meant I could spend the JS-light budget entirely on the kiosk's CSS choreography instead.

Next up: I'd like the kiosk's order number to actually reflect whichever dish you last tapped, and maybe have the characters glance toward the kiosk when its button pulses.

Thanks for reading — go tap the kiosk. 🍙