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Making a Better Custom Select Element
11.12.2019
We just covered The Current State of Styling Selects in 2019, but we didn't get nearly as far and fancy as Julie Grundy gets here. There is a decent chunk of JavaScript that powers it, so I'm still very much eyeballing browsers' recent interest in giving us more powerful selects in (presumably)...
WordPress.com: One CMS, Infinite Possibilities
11.12.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
Have you ever looked at a site and knew exactly what CMS powers it? You might see a distinctive design aesthetic that gives it away. Or maybe it's something even less obvious and even harder to articulate, but you know it when you see it.
That seems true with just about...
Quoting in HTML: Quotations, Citations, and Blockquotes
10.12.2019
It’s all too common to see the incorrect HTML used for quotes in markup. In this article, let’s dig into all this, looking at different situations and different HTML tags to handle those situations.
There are three major HTML elements involved...
How Facebook Avoids Ad Blockers
9.12.2019
Dylan Paulus:
Facebook actually hides 'dummy' DOM nodes between the 'Sponsored' text. These values are entirely random characters, with a random number of DOM nodes between them. Invisible characters. At this point our CSS ad blocker is completely broken. There is no way for us to possibly code...
Music and Web Design
9.12.2019
Brad has a long history in music outside of being a web designer, and draws some interesting parallels. One is that he had reached for more complex music in an effort to become a better musician — and developers can do the same thing. The other is that the composition of music can be seen...
A Handy Sass-Powered Tool for Making Balanced Color Palettes
9.12.2019
For those who may not come from a design background, selecting a color palette is often based on personal preferences. Choosing colors might be done with an online color tool, sampling from an image, "borrowing" from favorite brands, or just sort of randomly picking from a color wheel until...
Motion Paths – Past, Present and Future
6.12.2019
Cassie Evans has a great intro to motion paths. That is, being able to animate an element along a path. Not just up/down/left/right, but whatever curvy/wiggly/weird path you want.
It's an interesting subject because there are so many different technologies helping to do it over time. SMIL...
Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2019 refresh
6.12.2019
Lynn Fisher walks us step-by-step through the redesign process of her latest outstanding personal website. In this design, increasing the width of the browser window will cause the illustrations on the page crack to open and reveal more within them:
This case study reminded me that Lynn also has...
Techniques for Rendering Text with WebGL
6.12.2019
As is the rule in WebGL, anything that seems like it should be simple is actually quite complicated. Drawing lines, debugging shaders, text rendering… they are all damn hard to do well in WebGL.
Isn’t that weird? WebGL doesn't have a built-in function for rendering text. Although text seems like...
CSS Architecture for Modern JavaScript Applications
6.12.2019
There is a lot to like from Mike Riethmuller here:
The title. When you're building a website from JavaScript-powered components anyway, that is a moment to talk about how to do styling, because it opens some doors to JavaScript-powered styles that you probably wouldn't otherwise choose.
The...
Weekly Platform News: Upgrading Navigations to HTTPS, Sale of .org Domains, New Browser Engine
5.12.2019
In this week's roundup: DuckDuckGo gets smarter encryption, a fight over the sale of dot org domains, and a new browser engine is in the works.
Let's get into the news!
DuckDuckGo upgrades and open-sources its encryption
DuckDuckGo has open-sourced its “Smarter Encryption” technology that enables...
Auto Layout lands in Figma
5.12.2019
Here’s a fresh update to my favorite design tool that is thoroughly exciting: Auto layout! That means we can make frames that resize based on the size of the content within it. That's particularly useful for buttons in a design system where you want to drop a button on the page and then keep...
The Rising Complexity of JAMstack Sites and How to Manage Them
5.12.2019
When you add anything with user-generated content or dynamic data to a static site, the complexity of the build process can become comparable to launching a monolithic CMS. How can we add rich content to static sites without stitching together multiple third-party services?
For people in...
Firefox 71: First Out of the Gate With Subgrid
5.12.2019
A great release from Firefox this week! See the whole roundup post from Chris Mills. I'm personally stoked to see clip-path: path(); go live, which we've been tracking as it's so clearly useful. We also get column-span: all; which is nice in case you're one of the few taking advantages of...
Filtering Lists Dynamically With Vue on the Server Side is Easier Than You’d Think
4.12.2019
I recently attended the ARTIFACT conference in Austin, TX, and was inspired by a few talks about accessibility through the lens of site performance. It became clear to me that there is this tendency to rely on big JavaScript frameworks to handle the work — like React, Vue, and Angular — but that...
WhoCanUse
4.12.2019
There are loads of microsites and developer tools for looking at color accessibility, including tools built right into browser DevTools. They often show you if a color passes AA or AAA WCAG guidelines. But color contrast is more complicated than that because there is a wide variety of vision...
The New Klim Type Website is Impossibly Lovely
4.12.2019
I’ve spent the last hour hunched over the new Klim Type foundry website with my arms outstretched as if it was a fire in a very dark cave. Klim Type makes and sells wondrous fonts — like Tiempos, and National 2 or Pitch — and this fresh redesign now showcases them in all their glory. Here’s...
Dark Mode Favicons
4.12.2019
Oooo! A bonafide trick from Thomas Steiner. Chrome will soon be supporting SVG favicons (e.g. <link rel="icon" href="/icon.svg">). And you can embed CSS within an SVG with a <style> element. That CSS can use a perfers-color-sceme media query, and as a result, a favicon that supports...
State of JavaScript 2019 Survey
3.12.2019
Well, hey, look at that — it's time for this year's State of JavaScript survey!
You have taken this survey last year. Or in 2017. Or in 2016. It's been going on for a little while now and it always lends interesting insights into things like the features developers are using, the popularity...
Save Big on An Event Apart for a Limited Time!
3.12.2019
(This is a sponsored post.)
If you could get one gift from your boss this holiday season, what would you want it to be? You know, other than the usual mouse pad, picture frame or, my favorite, the ol' coffee mug and Starbucks card combo.
What if you were to receive something, hmm, more substantial?...