SVG is often the better choice for complex scenes. CSS cubes are fun to build and easy to animate, but a city block made of hundreds of divs is hard to change and heavy to render. We draw the static parts in SVG, keep the interactive blocks in CSS, and layer the two together.
Workshops taught us more than any tutorial. Watching people fold paper cubes and then rebuild them in CSS showed exactly where the mental model breaks: the order of rotations, the origin of each face, and the moment a block turns inside out. Most of our tutorials now start with the paper version for that reason.
Kofi Mensah
The paper cube exercise sounds fun. Are the templates available somewhere?
Quinn Adler
I tried this on an old iPad and one of the faces flickers on hover. Any idea why?
Dana Ortiz
Good question. Usually that means something is flattening the 3D context; check for overflow hidden on a parent.
Tess Walsh
Great write-up. Would love a follow-up on doing the same thing with SVG.
Omar Haddad
This is the clearest explanation of draw order I have read.
Chen Wei
Works nicely in Firefox. Safari needed the prefixed transform-style for us.
Rosa Medina
Thanks for covering reduced motion. It is so often an afterthought.
Nina Ahlberg
Short and useful. More quick tips like this, please.
Priya RamanAuthor
Thanks! A follow-up is already in the drafts.
Ivo Petrov
Glad it helped. The values are in the colour ratios reference.