Alright, so I was messing around with HTML canvas the other day, just seeing what I could knock together. I figured, why not try to draw something recognizable? And the Adidas stripes, you know, the three classic bars, they popped into my head. Seemed like a decent challenge.
Getting Started with the Canvas
First off, I just threw a basic <canvas> tag into an HTML file. Nothing wild. Gave it an ID so I could grab it with JavaScript. You know the drill: and then get the 2D context. That’s always the first step, pretty straightforward stuff.
I set a width and height for the canvas, maybe something like 400×400 pixels, just to have a decent space to work in. Then I thought about the background. Sometimes a dark background makes white stripes pop, or vice-versa. I just filled it with a plain color to start.
Thinking About Those Stripes
Now, the Adidas logo I was thinking of is the simple one, the three slanted bars. Not the trefoil, the leafy one, because man, that would be a whole different ball game with all those curves. I wanted to keep it manageable.
My first thought was, “Okay, three rectangles.” fillRect() is easy enough. But then, they’re slanted. So, do I rotate the whole canvas? Or try to draw skewed rectangles? I figured rotating the whole canvas for each stripe individually, or trying to manage complex transformations for simple bars, might get messy fast. I’ve been down that road before, and it can turn into a real headache trying to get things back to normal for the next shape.
The Path to… Well, Paths!
So, I decided the best way, or at least the way that gave me the most control, was to use paths. You know, with beginPath(), moveTo(), lineTo(), and then fill(). This way, I could define each stripe as a custom shape, basically a parallelogram.
This is where the real work started. I had to figure out the coordinates for each point of each parallelogram. I wanted three of them, obviously. They needed to be parallel, have that iconic slant, and be spaced out nicely. Sounds simple, but getting those numbers right took a surprising amount of fiddling.
I basically drew it out on paper first, trying to get a feel for the angles and the lengths. Then I started translating that into (x, y) coordinates. My first attempt, not gonna lie, looked a bit wonky. One stripe was fatter than the others, or the slant was off. It was a lot of trial and error.
- I’d set the starting point for the first stripe.
- Then calculate the next three points to make the parallelogram shape.
- Then, I had to figure out how to position the second stripe relative to the first, and the third relative to the second.
I remember spending a good chunk of time just tweaking numbers. Change one x-value, then have to adjust a y-value. It’s like when you’re trying to line up posters on a wall, and you keep stepping back, tilting your head, and then nudging one a tiny bit. Yeah, it was like that, but with numbers.
Getting the Look Right
Once I had the basic shapes plotted out, filling them was the easy part. fillStyle = 'black' (or white, depending on the background I’d chosen) and then fill(). Seeing them actually appear as solid shapes was pretty satisfying after all that coordinate juggling.
But it wasn’t over. Then came the refinement. Were the stripes thick enough? Was the angle aggressive enough? Was the spacing between them consistent and pleasing to the eye? More tweaking. I adjusted the overall height of the stripes, the width, the gap. I even played around with the amount of slant. It’s funny how small changes can make a big difference to the overall feel.
I didn’t bother making it super responsive or anything fancy. This was just a quick exercise to see if I could replicate that look with basic canvas drawing. No libraries, no fancy frameworks, just pure JavaScript and the canvas API.
So, What’s the Takeaway?
In the end, I got something that looked pretty decent, definitely recognizable as those three stripes. It wasn’t pixel-perfect to the official logo, of course. I wasn’t aiming for a counterfeit operation here, just a bit of canvas practice.
What I mostly re-learned, or reinforced, was how much detailed work can go into drawing even seemingly simple geometric shapes when you’re doing it programmatically. It’s not like dragging shapes around in a design tool. You gotta think about the numbers, the sequence of drawing operations. It’s a good way to get a solid understanding of coordinate systems and path drawing on the canvas.
It was a fun little project for an afternoon. And hey, now I have a snippet of code that draws three slanted bars. You never know when that might come in handy, right? Probably never, but it was a good way to pass the time and stretch those canvas muscles a bit.