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The Expanding Gamut of Color on the Web
27.5.2020
CSS was introduced to the web all the way back in 1996. At the time, most computer monitors were pretty terrible. The colors of CSS — whether defined with the RGB, HSL, or hexadecimal format — catered to the monitors of the time, all within the sRGB colorspace.
Most newer devices have a wide-gamut...
Framer Web
26.5.2020
The prototyping app Framer just launched the web version of their design tool and it looks pretty darn neat. I particularly love the design of the marketing site that explains how to use Framer and what sets it apart from other design tools. They have a ton of examples that you can pop open...
min(), max(), and clamp() are CSS magic!
12.5.2020
Nice video from Kevin Powell. Here are some notes, thoughts, and stuff I learned while watching it. Right when they came out, I was mostly obsessed with font-size usage, but they are just functions, so they can be used anywhere you’d use a number, like a length.
Sometimes pretty basic usage...
Dark mode and variable fonts
23.4.2020
Not so long ago, we wrote about dark mode in CSS and I’ve been thinking about how white text on a black background is pretty much always harder to read than black text on a white background. After thinking about this for a while, I realized that we can fix that problem by making the text thinner...
How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written
18.4.2020
Interesting research from Dan Luu:
… it’s pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it’s not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic.
I think this is...
How to Re-Create a Nifty Netflix Animation in CSS
7.4.2020
The design for Netflix’s browse page has remained pretty similar for a few years now. One mainstay component is the preview slider that allows users to scroll through content and hover on items to see a preview.
One unique characteristic of the UI is its hover behavior. When a show preview...
Get Static
26.3.2020
In this piece, Eric Meyer argues that performance is more important than ever right now — especially for websites that contain critical information for the public:
If you are in charge of a web site that provides even slightly important information, or important services, it’s time to...
Add Beautiful Images with the Unsplash API
26.3.2020
Perhaps you know Unsplash? I'd wager it's the most popular stock photography site out there for two big reasons:
Every photo on there is pretty darn nice
Every photo is entirely free even for commercial use. You don't have to ask permission or even credit it (although that's appreciated).
Here's...
A Few Background Patterns Sites
18.3.2020
If I need a quick background pattern to spruce something up, I often think of the CSS3 Patterns Gallery. Some of those are pretty intense but remember they are easily editable because they are just CSS. That means you could take these bold zags and chill them out.
CodePen Embed Fallback
My usual...
How to Track, Get and Set the Best Transaction Fees with Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash
14.3.2020
Once set up with a bitcoin or bitcoin cash wallet and some coins, using and sending them is pretty easy. Part of this process involves paying a transaction fee, which is a small amount of coin included in a transaction incentivizing miners to work the tx into a block. Both BTC and BCH transactions...
Make Yourself a Little API With Netlify Functions
10.3.2020
Here's an example of a nice little use case for cloud functions. Glitch has this great package of friendly words. Say you wanted to randomly generate "happy-elephant" or "walking-tree", and you need to do that on your website in JavaScript. Well, this package is pretty big (~200 KB), necessarily...
Google Fonts + Variable Fonts
7.3.2020
I see Google Fonts rolled out a new design (Tweet). Compared to the last big redesign, this feels much more iterative. I can barely tell the difference really, except it's blue instead of red and this one pretty rad checkbox: Show only variable fonts.
An option to only show variable fonts is...
The 3 Laws of Serverless
6.3.2020
Burke Holland thinks that to "build applications without thinking about servers" is a pretty good way to describe serverless, but...
Nobody really thinks about servers when they are writing their code. I mean, I doubt any developer has ever thrown up their hands and said “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait...
Considerations for Creating a Card Component
2.3.2020
Here's a Card component in React:
const Card = props ={
return(
<div className="card"<h2{props.title}</h2<p{props.content}</p</div)
}
It might be pretty useful! If you end up using this thing hundreds of times, now you have the ability to refactor a little bit of HTML...
Data-driven Jamstack with Sourcebit
28.2.2020
Think of building sites with Gatsby as an hourglass shape.
Gatsby itself is right in the middle. The wide funnel at the top represents the fact that Gatsby can take in data from all sorts of sources. The data could be in markdown files, from a headless CMS or some other API, from a hosted database...
Animate SVG Path Changes in CSS
20.2.2020
Every once in a while I'm motivated to attempt to draw some shapes with <path>, the all-powerful drawing syntax of SVG. I only understand a fragment of what it all can do, but I know enough to be dangerous. All the straight-line syntax commands (like L) are pretty straightforward and I find...
Design Systems Blogathon
11.2.2020
It was fun watching a bunch of back and forth blogging between a bunch of smart people quoting a bunch of smart people last week. If you missed it, you might wanna start at the end and work backward.
I only have one tidbit to add. I don't do much with design systems as someone who works on pretty...
Resizing Values in Steps in CSS
30.1.2020
There actually is a steps() function in CSS, but it's only used for animation. You can't, for example, tell an element it's allowed to grow in height but only in steps of 10px. Maybe someday? I dunno. There would have to be some pretty clear use cases that something like background-repeat: space...
Four Layouts for the Price of One
29.1.2020
Pretty notable when a tweet about a flexbox layouts gets 8K+ likes on Twitter!
4 layouts for the price of 1, thanks flex ????
css` form { display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;
& > input { flex: 1 1 10ch; margin: .5rem;
&[type="email"] { flex: 3...
Flexible Captioned Slanted Images
25.1.2020
The end result of Eric Meyer's tutorial on creating this row of slanted images is pretty classy. But it's more about the journey than the destination (there isn't even really an isolated demo for it). Eric does an amazing job at talking it through like a thought process.
We did that recently, only...