Dual Tone Outline

The border is split into two halves — left edge stays neutral while the right half lights up violet on focus. A subtle "active half" cue.

Pure CSS MIT licensed

Dual Tone Outline the 24th of 32 designs in the 32 CSS Search Box & Search Bar Designs collection. The design is implemented in pure CSS — no JavaScript required. Copy the HTML and CSS panels below into your project. Because the demo is pure CSS, it works in any framework or templating engine you happen to use. The design honours prefers-reduced-motion and uses real semantic markup, so it ships accessibility-ready out of the box.

Live preview

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The code

<form class="csb-dual" role="search">
  <label class="csb-sr" for="csb-dual-i">Search</label>
  <input id="csb-dual-i" type="search" name="q" placeholder="Search..." />
</form>

.csb-dual {
  position: relative; display: inline-block;
  padding: 1.5px;
  background: linear-gradient(90deg, rgba(255,255,255,0.08) 0%, rgba(255,255,255,0.08) 50%, #7c6cff 50%, #7c6cff 100%);
  background-size: 200% 100%;
  background-position: 0% 0%;
  border-radius: 10px;
  transition: background-position 0.4s ease;
}
.csb-dual:focus-within { background-position: 100% 0%; }
.csb-dual input {
  display: block;
  width: 240px; padding: 11px 14px;
  border: 0; outline: none;
  background: #1a1a28;
  border-radius: 9px;
  color: #f0eeff; font: 500 14px/1 system-ui, sans-serif;
}
.csb-dual input::placeholder { color: #b8b6d4; }

.csb-sr {
  position: absolute !important;
  width: 1px;
  height: 1px;
  padding: 0;
  margin: -1px;
  overflow: hidden;
  clip: rect(0, 0, 0, 0);
  white-space: nowrap;
  border: 0;
}

More from 32 CSS Search Box & Search Bar Designs

Clear-on-Type Keyboard Hint Animated Placeholder Avatar Search Brutalist Stamp Compact Toolbar Hero Search Side Indicator Drop Shadow Float Search + Filter Glitch Search Compact Mobile

View the full collection →