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Microsites for Case Studies
7.5.2018
A lot of y'all have personal sites. Personal sites with portfolios. Or you work for or own an agency where showing off the work you do is arguably even more important. Often the portfolio area of a site is the most fretted and hard to pull off. Do you link to the live projects? Screenshots?...
CSS Environment Variables
4.5.2018
We were all introduced to the env() function in CSS when all that drama about "The Notch" and the iPhone X was going down. The way that Apple landed on helping us move content away from those "unsafe" areas was to provide us essentially hard-coded variables to use:
padding:
...
Inspecting Animations in DevTools
4.5.2018
I stumbled upon the Animation panel in Chrome’s DevTools the other day and almost jumped out of my seat with pure joy. Not only was I completely unaware that such a thing exists, but it was better than what I could’ve hoped: it lets you control and manipulate CSS animations and visualize...
Responsive Knockout Text With Looping Video
3.5.2018
Here’s an idea! Let’s make an an HTML <video> play inside the shape of some letters. Like "Knockout Text" except instead of an image behind, it’s video. A live demo will explain more clearly:
See the Pen basic pen by Giulio Mainardi (@mgiulio) on CodePen.
A key objective here is to develop...
Container-Adapting Tabs With “More” Button
2.5.2018
Or the priority navigation pattern, or progressively collapsing navigation menu. We can name it in at least three ways.
There are multiple UX solutions for tabs and menus and each of them have their own advantages over another, you just need to pick the best for the case you are trying to solve....
Solved With CSS! Dropdown Menus
1.5.2018
A common UI pattern that we see on the web are dropdown menus. They’re used to display related information in pieces, without overwhelming the user with buttons, text, and options. Somewhere that we see these a lot is inside of headers or navigation areas on websites.
Let’s see if we can make...
Finger-friendly numerical inputs with `inputmode`
30.4.2018
Forms are often a nightmare on mobile. We can make the process as pain-free as possible by reacting to context. Input fields that expect numerical values should have a numerical UI. Bringing up a number keyboard on small screens is easy on most platforms — just use a <input...
Radial Gradient Recipes
26.4.2018
Radial gradients are pretty dang cool. It's amazing we can paint the background of an element with them so easily. Easily is a relative term though. It's certainly easier than needing to create a graphic in third-party software to use as the background, and the syntax is highly learnable. But it's...
Understanding React `setState`
25.4.2018
React components can, and often do, have state. State can be anything, but think of things like whether a user is logged in or not and displaying the correct username based on which account is active. Or an array of blog posts. Or if a modal is open or not and which tab within it is active.
React...
Server-Side Visualization With Nightmare
24.4.2018
This is an extract from chapter 11 of Ashley Davis’s book Data Wrangling with JavaScript now available on the Manning Early Access Program. I absolutely love this idea as there is so much data visualization stuff on the web that relies on fully functioning client side JavaScript and potentially...
Native-Like Animations for Page Transitions on the Web
23.4.2018
Some of the most inspiring examples I’ve seen of front-end development have involved some sort of page transitions that look slick like they do in mobile apps. However, even though the imagination for these types of interactions seem to abound, their presence on actual sites that I visit do not....
Choosing a Responsive Email Framework: MJML vs. Foundation for Emails
20.4.2018
Implementing responsive email design can be a bit of a drag. Building responsive emails isn’t simple at all, it is like taking a time machine back to 2001 when we were all coding website layouts in tables using Dreamweaver and Fireworks.
But there's hope! We have tools available that can make...
What are Higher-Order Components in React?
19.4.2018
If you have been in the React ecosystem for a while, there is a possibility that you have heard about Higher Order Components. Let’s look at a simple implementation while also trying to explain the core idea. From here you should get a good idea of how they work and even put them to use.
Why...