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Successful WordPress Freelancing
23.1.2019
Andy Adams released a book for aspiring WordPress freelancers. It's meant to take a lot of the guesswork and the roadblocks that many folks often hit when making the decision to fly solo and rely on WordPress development for a stable source of work and income.
Aside from being included in it (and...
The Secret Weapon to Learning CSS
22.1.2019
For some reason, I’ve lately been thinking a lot about what it takes to break into the web design industry and learn CSS. I reckon it has something to do with Keith Grant’s post earlier this month on a CSS mental model where he talks about a “common core for CSS”:
We need common core tricks like...
The Great Divide
21.1.2019
Let’s say there is a divide happening in front-end development. I feel it, but it's not just in my bones. Based on an awful lot of written developer sentiment, interviews Dave Rupert and I have done on ShopTalk, and in-person discussion, it’s, as they say... a thing.
The divide is between people...
In Defense of Utility-First CSS
15.1.2019
A rather full-throated argument (or rather, response to arguments against) utility (atomic) CSS from Sarah Dayan. I wondered recently if redesigns were potentially a weakness of these types of systems (an awful lot of tearing down classes) which Sarah acknowledges and recommends more abstraction...
Design v17
14.1.2019
We rolled out a new site design on January 1! This is the 17th version of CSS-Tricks if you can believe that. The versions tend to evolve a decent amount beyond the initial launch, but we archive screenshots on this design history page. Like I said in our 2018 thank you post:
This is easily...
5 Hottest VS Code Themes To Use in 2019
10.1.2019
Visual Studio Code is incredibly easy to customize, including adding some awesome looking themes. Themes can give your editor a lot of personality and make it more fun to work with
6 Popular CSS Frameworks to Use in 2019
7.1.2019
Creating consistent, concise, and effective CSS can be quite a lot of work. There are so many things to consider like responsiveness, accessibility, and structure. This is exactly why CSS Framework
Gulp for WordPress: Initial Setup
26.12.2018
This is the first part of a two-part series on creating a Gulp workflow for WordPress theme development. This first part covers a lot of ground for the initial setup, including Gulp installation and an outline of the tasks we want it to run. If you're interested in how the tasks are created, then...
DRY State Switching With CSS Variables: Fallbacks and Invalid Values
6.12.2018
This is the second post in a two-part series that looks into the way CSS variables can be used to make the code for complex layouts and interactions less difficult to write and a lot easier to maintain. The first installment walks through various use cases where this technique applies. This post...
DRY Switching with CSS Variables: The Difference of One Declaration
5.12.2018
This is the first post of a two-part series that looks into the way CSS variables can be used to make the code for complex layouts and interactions less difficult to write and a lot easier to maintain. This first installment walks through various use cases where this technique applies. The second...
Download a YouTube Channel’s Videos
7.11.2018
YouTube is an endless source of entertainment, be it stuff you’re proud to share you like or stuff you would rather others not know about (see: David’s history of watching old WWE Royal Rumbles). I watch a lot of YouTube in hotels and on flights when I don’t have internet access...
Teaching Your Clients How to Use The Website You Built Them
27.7.2018
I share my own thoughts on how you might go about educating someone you just built a site for. But it turns out I had a lot of fun putting together a ton of other people's thoughts as well. I tweeted about it and got a flood of responses, so this article is an amalgamation of all that.
Direct...
CSS: A New Kind of JavaScript
19.7.2018
In this wacky and satirical post, Heydon Pickering describes a wild new technology called Cascading Style Sheets that solves a lot of the problems you might bump into when styling things with JavaScript:
A good sign that a technology is not fit for purpose is how much we have to rely on workarounds...
Design Systems at GitHub
12.7.2018
Here’s a nifty post by Diana Mounter all about the design systems team at GitHub that details how the team was formed, the problems they've faced and how they've adapted along the way:
When I started working at GitHub in late 2015, I noticed that there were many undocumented patterns, I had...
Prototyping in the Browser
5.7.2018
Prototyping animations and interactions is vital for a number of reasons: they can make your interface feel deceptively fast, they can help focus the user on a specific task, and they can provide a better sense of the current state of your application. Is data being loaded? Is something...
Clearfix: A Lesson in Web Development Evolution
3.7.2018
The web community has, for the most part, been a spectacularly open place. As such, a lot of the best development techniques happen right out in the open, on blogs and in forums, evolving as they’re passed around and improved. I thought it might be fun (and fascinating) to actually follow this...
Drawing Images with CSS Gradients
25.6.2018
What I mean by "CSS images" is images that are created using only HTML elements and CSS. They look as if they were SVGs drawn in Adobe Illustrator but they were made right in the browser. Some techniques I’ve seen used are tinkering with border radii, box shadows, and sometimes clip-path. You...
Balancing Time
22.6.2018
I first wrote this post four years ago. I put it on a blog that no longer exists. Funnily enough, I still refer to it myself, so I figured it might be best served in a place where other people can see it. I've made only a few minor tweaks to the original content. A lot about how I work has changed...
An Almost Ideal React Image Component
21.6.2018
Yes, this is a React component, but regardless if you care about that part or not, the "ideal image component" part could be of interest. There is a lot to consider with how we put images on web pages these days. This deals with:
Placeholder space (and then flexible responsive styles after...
What is SVG good for?
21.6.2018
Y'all probably wouldn't be surprised if I told you it's pretty awesome for icons, and icon systems. SVG icon systems can, and perhaps should be quite easy. I'm a fan of just inlining those suckers, particularly when they are pretty simple.
But what else?
Logos is a classic example! A lot...