There is a gap between pure CSS layout and custom design elements created in software such as Photoshop or Illustrator. Sophisticated SVG filters give us more independence from third-party design tools and bridge this gap by enabling us to create visual styles directly in the browser.Wouldn’t it be great if we could style letters the same way we usually style text with CSS? In this article Dirk Weber will show you how SVG filters help you to create playful, decorative web typography.
Read more…
With CSS’ clip-path property you will begin to think outside the box, literally, and hexagons, stars and octagons will begin to take form on your web pages. Once you get your hands dirty with clip-path, there’s no end to the shapes you can generate, simply by tweaking a few values. In this article, Karen Menezes will provide demos referenced to an inline SVG, in order to gain additional support on Firefox. Generating a responsive SVG clipped shape is trivial once you have created a responsive shape with CSS’ clip-path. We’ll look at this in detail later.
Read more…
Living style guides help front-end developers transform front-end codebases into well-described pattern libraries with the minimum of effort. But to make them really efficient, we need to choose the proper tools — so let’s have a closer look at what our community has to offer. In this article, Robert Haritonov has arranged the tools by function, highlighting only the most powerful ones worth knowing about. You can find more tools, plus videos, articles and other material about style guides at styleguide.io.
Read more…
Bugs erode trust, which in turn loses customers. So when Ben Gremillion began updating Foundation, a responsive CSS framework, he wanted to ensure everything worked. In this article Ben will teach you his methodology for testing responsively, not just on a case by case, page-from-PSD comp. He developed a certain system to make sure that nothing’s broken at launch on different devices. It’s not enough to look for blatant bugs. You have to be thorough: in execution, in accountability, and in direction.
Read more…
Using SVGs can reduce the number of HTTP requests for image replacement. it’s also easy to make an SVG scalable to its container for responsive development. In this article Sarah Drasner will cover a few ways of using SVG sprites to describe motion on the web. She’ll show some techniques for using SVG sprites in complex animation that takes advantage of these factors. All examples shown will assume the use of an auto-prefixer and some basic knowledge of CSS animations.
Read more…
Flex items are truly accommodating and a pleasure to work with. Most web apps consist of a series of modular, reusable components. You can use flexbox for those bits of layout that induce headaches and that depend on brittle CSS hacks to work. It takes a while to have your “Aha!” moment with flexbox, because it involves unlearning what you already know about CSS layouting. But once you speak the flexbox language fluently, your process of designing responsive apps will become effortless and your style sheets will get leaner!
Read more…
JavaScript is “real” programming. This means you not only have to learn a whole new and complex syntax but also have to “learn how to think.” The barriers to entry are high and prevent many designers from taking the plunge. uilang tries to fix that. In this article Benjamin De Cock will introduce you to uilang’s philosophy and syntax. You’ll start with a simple example to get you comfortable with the basics, before moving to something more exciting. At the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to code many typical interface widgets, such as popovers, tabs, overlays and much, much more.
Read more…
Print style sheets is the main thing that comes to mind if you mention printing with CSS. But CSS is also being used to format books, catalogs and brochures — content that may never have been designed to be a web page at all. In this article, Rachel Andrew will take a look at the CSS modules that have been created not for use in web browsers, but to deal with printed and paged media. She’ll explain how the selectors, properties and values that they introduce work. She’ll finish up with a working example that you can use as a starting point for your own experiments.
Read more…
The World Wide Web is not static. Quite the opposite: It’s responsive, fluid, evolving and ever changing.
Web designers need to be familiar with HTML and CSS code and front-end technologies when they conceive a website or application’s interface. In Creative Suite version 6, a CSS Properties panel was added to its toolset — a tool that, if used properly, could help both designers with CSS coding experience and beginners alike. By the end of this article, you should have a better overview of this feature and also know how to use it with CSS Professionalzr, a free extension developed by Matt Stow to further optimize the code generated by the panel.
Read more…
Developing a polyfill is not the easiest challenge. On the other hand, the solution can be used for a relatively long time: standards do not change often and have been discussed at length behind the scenes. Also everyone is using the same language and is connecting with the same APIs which is a great thing. This is quite a technical article, and while Maksim Chemerisuk will try to minimize the code snippets, this article still contains quite a few of them. So, be prepared!
Read more…
