Posts Tagged “CSS”

CSS Columns

I frequently use CSS multi-column layout (i.e. column-count: 3) for basic list items limited to words or phrases (like my search page tags list), but I’ve always struggled to make the property work with more complex... read more

Viewport Padding

I was inspecting Ethan’s site the other day (as totally normal and well-adjusted people do) and realized he was using one of my favorite tricks where viewport units were combined with em units via calc() for... read more

Native CSS Variables

I’ve been using Sass variables for quite a while, so I’m interested to see how native CSS variables (AKA CSS custom properties) compare to preprocessor variables. W3C Info Can I use info MDN intro / demo... read more

BreakpointTester

I’m loving BreakpointTester. It’s a bookmarklet that scans your CSS/breakpoints and displays them all at once. It shows not images, but actual web pages you can scroll, navigate, and even web inspect. Brilliant! read more

Fast Track to Sass

Steve Drucker from Fig Leaf Software recently published Fast Track to Sass. The book uses my CSS Zen Garden Apothecary Theme as the example site—transitioning it from CSS to Sass. Thanks, Steve! read more

WRKSHOP

I’ll be leading a workshop (for WRKSHOP) on responsive layouts & prototypes in Austin this April 4th. I didn’t feel confident as a web designer until I got comfortable with CSS layouts, so that’s exactly what... read more

Brent Jackson’s Colorable & Shade

Brent Jackson (http://jxnblk.com) has been building some really great tools recently. Colorable helps you test color combinations/palettes with WCAG accessibility guidelines in a visual way. He’s also built a text version with a crazy-simple UI. And... read more

CSS Zen Garden #221

There’s a lot to love about Andrew Lohman’s CSS Zen Garden #221 theme, Mid-Century Modern. In addition to the type, color palette, and imagery, I am particularly fond of the layout itself. Each section flows nicely... read more

Flexible Foundations

Responsive or not, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t all be designing and building sites on flexible foundations. This concept is nothing new, having been prophetically outlined in Jon Allsopp’s 2000 article, A Dao of Web... read more

Keeping Current With CSS

I recently got a question about CSS experimentation from Paddy O’Hanlon, and I thought it warranted a quick post. @TrentWalton I’m reading your interview in the new Insites Book. You mention testing out new CSS. Where... read more

Icon Fonts

Chris Coyier’s Icon Fonts are Awesome demo pushed me up to the edge, and seeing how fuzzy image icons look next to ultra-crisp retina display text threw me over. Now, I’m testing out an icon font... read more

CSS Column Breaks

I’ve been working on a responsive project with lots of content that will need to be updated frequently. Rather than using a more traditional HTML & CSS column/grid approach, I opted for column-count to keep everything... read more

New Adventures Workshop

The time for New Adventures is nearly upon us! I’ve been building slides for my talk as well as prepping materials for my workshop on controlling web typography. The plan is to spend some time exploring... read more

Things Still Missing From CSS

Molly Holzschlag wrote a great article for .Net Magazine outlining seven things still missing from CSS. She gets into web fonts on #5, which is my favorite. I particularly liked this point: Fine control remains elusive... read more

Netmag: Texturizing Web Type

I recently wrote a tutorial on texturizing web type for .Net magazine (Issue 221). One of my favorite CSS properties for text, mask-image, is covered in-depth from creating a semi-transparent texture in Photoshop to implementing it... read more

CSS Off

Gene Crawford from UnmatchedStyle asked Paravel to design a page for this year’s CSS Off competition. Over 5,000 front-end developers have entered to show off their skills by taking a PSD we designed and coding it... read more

CSS Hyphenation

After reading this Fontdeck Blog post a few of weeks ago, I dropped an exciting new CSS property into the stylesheet for this blog. Wanting to test hyphenation on all my posts and pages, I applied... read more

Content Choreography

The concept of permanently placing content on a web page for a single browsing width or resolution is becoming a thing of the past. Media-queried responsive & adaptive sites afford us the ability to re-architect content... read more

Converge SE 2011

I’ll be doing double duty this June at Converge SE, teaming up with my Paravel cohorts, Dave & Reagan, for a workshop called Designing with Type on Friday, and speaking about Controlling Web Typography on Saturday.... read more

Controlling Web Typography

Lettering.js was built to solve a problem. As web typography improves, web designers want the same level of control print designers have. Just as we’ve moved beyond Helvetica and Times New Roman, we’ve begun to think... read more

RGBa & HSLa CSS Color

In certain situations, RGBa (red, green, blue, alpha) and HSLa (hue, saturation, lightness, alpha) color values can save the day.  It’s widely supported in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and IE 9, and when working with box-shadow,... read more

CSS Box-Shadow:Inset

You’ve gotta appreciate the imageless design elements the CSS box-shadow property makes possible. No more slicing up 3 jpgs to recreate the depth so easily gained in Photoshop. Lately, we’ve been using box-shadow:inset on some Paravel... read more

Fun With CSS Text-Shadow

I used 100 text-shadows to make the graphic below happen. Sure, it’s excessive, ridiculous and just plain silly. But why, at times, can’t the web be all of those things? I’m all for sensible, well-reasoned CSS,... read more

Lost World’s Fairs

IE9 public beta is here, and I’ve had the fair fortune to be recruited by The Friends of Mighty to showcase its support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF). A while back, Jason Santa Maria... read more

Don’t Make Me Wait

Page speed and load times are the foundation for a positive user experience on the web. Let’s face it, if your page fails to load in time, all the effort put towards information architecture, content strategy... read more

CSS Webkit Appearance

I did my fair share of testing this site on an iPad during development. In most cases, the version of Mobile Safari found on the iPad renders pages like any other standards-based browser. Only when I... read more

Safari Extension: Live CSS Editor

Since downloading Safari 5, I’ve been incorporating some new extensions into the ol’ workflow. While I typically use CSSEdit to pick apart code in-depth, Jeremy Hubert’s Live CSS Editing Extension allows Safari users to make quick,... read more

Non Hover

“Elements that rely only on mousemove, mouseover, mouseout or the CSS pseudo-class :hover may not always behave as expected on a touch-screen device such as iPad or iPhone.” A few days after Steve Jobs announced the... read more

CSS Text-Rendering

This morning I saw a couple of tweets from @seangaffney and @maxvoltar about the CSS text-rendering property, which is in the W3C Working Draft. Aesthetically Loyal has outlined the differences in kerning pairs and browser support... read more

Trimming The Fat

The last version of this site lasted just under a year. That may seem like a short amount of time until you consider how quickly things change on the web. @font-face usage has been fortified by... read more

TDC in CSS3

Earlier this year I was fortunate enough to become acquainted with Brian Hoff through DesignSwap and Dribbble. After being really impressed with his redesign shots for The Design Cubicle , I was thrilled when Paravel got... read more

CSS3 Transition-Delay

In another round of CSS3 experimentation, I wanted to see if it was possible to sequentially transition the opacity of 3 or more elements via CSS without having them all begin fading at once. While it... read more

Position Absolute

Put on your critical thinking caps… In web design there are very few absolutes. There are multiple ways to markup pages, limitless directions a design can take and no single right or wrong way to run... read more

A Fresh Coat of Paint

Update: Surprise—This post is now outdated & is about a previous version of this site. To learn more about what I’ve got cooking now, click here. It may not look like it, but this version is... read more