Test your skills: Backgrounds and borders

The aim of this skill test is to assess whether you understand backgrounds and borders of boxes in CSS.

Note: Click "Play" in the code blocks below to edit the examples in the MDN Playground. You can also copy the code (click the clipboard icon) and paste it into an online editor such as CodePen, JSFiddle, or Glitch. If you get stuck, you can reach out to us in one of our communication channels.

Task 1

In this task, we want you to add a background, border, and some basic styles to a page header:

Give the box a 5px black solid border, with rounded corners of 10px.
Give the <h2> a semi-transparent black background color, and make the text white.
Add a background image and size it so that it covers the box. You can use the following image:
```
https://mdn.github.io/shared-assets/images/examples/balloons.jpg
```

Your final result should look like the image below:

Images shows a box with a photograph background, rounded border and white text on a semi-transparent black background.

Try to update the code below to recreate the finished example:

html

<div class="box">
  <h2>Backgrounds & Borders</h2>
</div>

body {
  padding: 1em;
  font: 1.2em / 1.5 sans-serif;
}
* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}
.box {
  padding: 0.5em;
}

css

.box {
  /* Add styles here */
}

h2 {
  /* Add styles here */
}

Click here to show the solution

You should use border, border-radius, background-image, and background-size and understand how to use RGB colors to make a background color partly transparent:

css

.box {
  border: 5px solid #000;
  border-radius: 10px;
  background-image: url(https://mdn.github.io/shared-assets/images/examples/balloons.jpg);
  background-size: cover;
}

h2 {
  background-color: rgb(0 0 0 / 50%);
  color: #fff;
}

Task 2

In this task, we want you to add background images, a border, and some other styling to a decorative box:

Give the box a 5px lightblue border and round the top left corner 20px and the bottom right corner 40px.
The heading uses the star.png image as a background image, with a single centered star on the left and a repeating pattern of stars on the right. You can use the following image:
```
https://mdn.github.io/shared-assets/images/examples/star.png
```
Make sure that the heading text does not overlay the image, and that it is centered — you will need to use techniques learned in previous lessons to achieve this.

Your final result should look like the image below:

Images shows a box with a blue border rounded at the top left and bottom right corners. On the left of the text is a single star, on the right 3 stars.

Try to update the code below to recreate the finished example:

html

<div class="box">
  <h2>Backgrounds & Borders</h2>
</div>

body {
  padding: 1em;
  font: 1.2em / 1.5 sans-serif;
}
* {
  box-sizing: border-box;
}
.box {
  width: 300px;
  padding: 0.5em;
}

css

.box {
  /* Add styles here */
}

h2 {
  /* Add styles here */
}

Click here to show the solution

You need to add padding to the heading so that it doesn't overlay the star image - this links back to learning from the earlier Box Model lesson. The text should be aligned with the text-align property:

css

.box {
  border: 5px solid lightblue;
  border-top-left-radius: 20px;
  border-bottom-right-radius: 40px;
}

h2 {
  padding: 0 40px;
  text-align: center;
  background:
    url(https://mdn.github.io/shared-assets/images/examples/star.png) no-repeat
      left center,
    url(https://mdn.github.io/shared-assets/images/examples/star.png) repeat-y
      right center;
}

Task 1

Task 2

See also