August 12, 2020
Article, framework

Halfmoon: A Bootstrap Alternative with Dark Mode Built In

I recently launched the first production version of Halfmoon, a front-end framework that I have been building for the last few months. This is a short introductory post about what the framework is, and why I decided to build it. The elevator pitch Halfmoon is a front-end framework with a few interesting things going for […]

August 10, 2020
Article, content, copywriting

Every Website is an Essay

Every website that’s made me oooo and aaahhh lately has been of a special kind; they’re written and designed like essays. There’s an argument, a playfulness in the way that they’re not so much selling me something as they are trying to convince me of the thing. They use words and type and color in […]

August 8, 2020
accessibility, Article, canvas, JavaScript

Nailing the Perfect Contrast Between Light Text and a Background Image

Have you ever come across a site where light text is sitting on a light background image? If you have, you’ll know how difficult that is to read. A popular way to avoid that is to use a transparent overlay. But this leads to an important question: Just how transparent should that overlay be? It’s […]

August 6, 2020
Article

Chapter 1: Birth | CSS-Tricks

Tim Berners-Lee is fascinated with information. It has been his life’s work. For over four decades, he has sought to understand how it is mapped and stored and transmitted. How it passes from person to person. How the seeds of information become the roots of dramatic change. It is so fundamental to the work that […]

August 3, 2020
Article, svg accessibility, SVG animation, vue components, vuex store

The Making of: Netlify’s Million Devs SVG Animation Site

The following article captures the process of building the Million Developers microsite for Netlify. This project was built by a few folks and we’ve captured some parts of the process of building it here- focusing mainly on the animation aspects, in case any are helpful to others building similar experiences. Building a Vue App out […]

August 1, 2020
Article, chrome, DevTools

A Look at What’s New in Chrome DevTools in 2020

I’m excited to share some of the newer features in Chrome DevTools with you. There’s a brief introduction below, and then we’ll cover many of the new DevTools features. We’ll also look at what’s happening in some other browsers. I keep up with this stuff, as I create Dev Tips, the largest collection of DevTools […]

July 30, 2020
accessibility, Article, icons, SVG, title

SVG Title vs. HTML Title Attribute

You know the title attribute? I can do this: I'm a div with a `title` And now if I’m on a device with a mouse pointer and hover the cursor over that element, I get… Which, uh, I guess is something. I sometimes use it for things like putting an expanded date or time on […]

July 28, 2020
Article, learning

Want to get better at code? Teach someone CSS.

A friend of mine recently asked me to teach her to code. She was an absolute beginner, having no idea what coding really involves. I decided to start where I started: HTML and CSS. Using CodePen, we started forking Pens and altering them. Soon, a learning path started to unravel. The aim of this article […]

July 24, 2020
Article, svg icons, vue

A Font-Like SVG Icon System for Vue

Managing a custom collection of icons in a Vue app can be challenging at times. An icon font is easy to use, but for customization, you have to rely on third-party font generators, and merge conflicts can be painful to resolve since fonts are binary files. Using SVG files instead can eliminate those pain points, […]

July 20, 2020
Article, emphasis, italic

How to Italicize Text | CSS-Tricks

HTML and CSS offer us the ability to italicize text. I’m talking about text like this. Let’s cover everything you’ll need to know. What is italic text and why would you italicize text? You italicize text most often to call attention to it. Literally to emphasize a word, so that someone reading the sentence will […]

July 15, 2020
Article, navigation

Three CSS Alternatives to JavaScript Navigation

Hey quick! You’ve gotta create the navigation for the site and you start working on the mobile behavior. What pattern do you choose? If you’re like most folks, it’s probably the “hamburger” menu that, when clicked, uses a little JavaScript to expand a vertical list of navigation links. But that’s not the only option. Depending […]

July 13, 2020
Article, next.js

Building a Blog with Next.js

In this article, we will use Next.js to build a static blog framework with the design and structure inspired by Jekyll. I’ve always been a big fan of how Jekyll makes it easier for beginners to setup a blog and at the same time also provides a great degree of control over every aspect of […]

July 11, 2020
alpine.js, Article, eleventy, tailwind

An Eleventy Starter with Tailwind CSS and Alpine.js

When I decided to try to base my current personal website on Eleventy, I didn’t want to reinvent the wheel: I tested all the Eleventy starters built with Tailwind CSS that I could find in Starter Projects from the documentation. Many of the starters seemed to integrate Tailwind CSS in a contrived way. Also, some […]

July 9, 2020
Article, components, emotion, lists

How to Make a List Component with Emotion

I’ve been doing a bit of refactoring this week at Sentry and I noticed that we didn’t have a generic List component that we could use across projects and features. So, I started one, but here’s the rub: we style things at Sentry using Emotion, which I have only passing experience with and is described […]

July 4, 2020
Article, aspect ratio, responsive images

Fluid Images in a Variable Proportion Layout

Creating fluid images when they stand alone in a layout is easy enough nowadays. However, with more sophisticated interfaces we often have to place images inside responsive elements, like this card: For now, let’s say this image is not semantic content, but only decoration. That’s a good use for background-image. And because in this context […]

July 2, 2020
Article, Dark mode

A Complete Guide to Dark Mode on the Web

Dark mode has gained a lot of traction recently. Like Apple, for instance, has added dark mode to its iOS and MacOS operating systems. Windows and Google have done the same. DuckDuckGo’s light and dark themes Let’s get into dark mode in the context of websites. We’ll delve into different options and approaches to implementing […]

June 30, 2020
Article, calc, css variables, custom properties, filter, gradients, max, min, Sass

When Sass and New CSS Features Collide

Recently, CSS has added a lot of new cool features such as custom properties and new functions. While these things can make our lives a lot easier, they can also end up interacting with preprocessors, like Sass, in funny ways. So this is going to be a post about the issues I’ve encountered, how I […]

June 25, 2020
Article, localStorage, reactivity, vue, vue mixins

How to Make localStorage Reactive in Vue

Reactivity is one of Vue’s greatest features. It is also one of the most mysterious if you don’t know what it’s doing behind the scenes. Like, why does it work with objects and arrays and not with other things, like localStorage? Let’s answer that that question, and while we’re at it, make Vue reactivity work […]

June 21, 2020
Article, learning

Where Do You Learn HTML & CSS in 2020?

The question of how and where to learn HTML & CSS is a highly reasonable thing to ask. The answer depends on all sorts of things: how serious you are, your current foundation, what other resources are available to you, what you hope to do with what you learn, and how much time you have, […]

June 19, 2020
art, Article, css shapes

Advice for Complex CSS Illustrations

If you were to ask me what question I hear most about front-end development, I’d say it’s“How do I get better at CSS?”. That question usually comes up after sharing a CSS illustration I have made. It’s something I love to do over on CodePen. To many, CSS is this mythical beast that can’t be […]

Category: Article