Venn Diagram entirely in CSS

A friend of mine alerted me this weekend to just how much I have a weird fascination with Venn diagrams. I decided to roll with it. So yeah, I have an irrational love of Venn diagrams. But that begs the question, can I make a Venn diagram with just CSS?

I found a couple of examples out there:

• Dusting off front-end skills: CSS Venn Diagram
• HTML And CSS Venn Diagram

But I felt like they had a bit too much fluff in the HTML markup. Not that there is anything technically wrong with their implementations. I prefer complexity in my CSS and not in my HTML. It’s probably just a subjective thing, but I do.

So how do you do it?

First you create 3 divs. 1 for each Venn circle, and 1 for the overlap section. Each div contains a p with content in it.

https://gist.github.com/1664396.js?file=htmlportion.html

Then you go to style each of the circles. Give them matching heights and widths, and a border radius of half of the height. This creates the circle. Then give each one an opacity below 1. This will ensure that when they overlap they will form a new color.

https://gist.github.com/1664396.js?file=circles.css

I then created two rules based on the nth child css selector to color each of the circles. I also padded to ensure that there would be a space to write in the overlap section.

https://gist.github.com/1664396.js?file=eachcircle.css

Finally I styled the overlap section using relative positioning and pulled it back towards the center.

https://gist.github.com/1664396.js?file=overlap.css

The real trick is to watch the pixel counts because a couple are directly related.

To create a circle:

• width must equal height
• border radius must equal 50% of width.

To overlap circles:

• Circle 2 must have negative x left margin
• (Or Circle 1 must have negative x right margin)
• Each circle must have x padding-left or x padding-right to ensure its text doesn’t spill over borders

It looks like the example works across modern browsers, including IE 9, but not previous versions.