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Let’s do a little step-by-step of a situation where you can’t quite do what seems to make sense, but you can still get it done with CSS trickery. In this case, it’ll be applying a shadow to a shape.

You make a box

You fashion it into a nice tag shape

You use clip-path because it’s great for that.

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You want a shadow on it, so you…

Try to use box-shadow.

But it doesn’t work. Nothing shows up. You think you’re going crazy. You assume you have the syntax wrong. You don’t. The problem is that clip-path is cutting it off.

You can drop-shadow a parent element instead

There is a filter that does shadows as well: drop-shadow(). But you can’t use it directly on the element because the clip-path will cut it off as well. So you make a parent:

Clip Box

You can’t use box-shadow on that parent either, because the parent is still a rectangle and the shadow will look wrong. But you can use filter, and the shadow will follow the shape.

Clip Box Turtles Nails

See the Pen
Shadow on Shape by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier)
on CodePen.

Sterilite Deep Clip Box

That’s all.