In my last article we saw how CSS background properties allow us to create cool hover effects. This time, we will focus on the CSS text-shadow property to explore even more interesting hovers. You are probably wondering how adding shadow to text can possibly give us a cool effect, but here’s the catch: we’re not actually going to make any shadows for these text hover effects. text-shadow but no text shadows? Let me clear the confusion by showing the hover effect..

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Braydon Coyer recently launched a monthly CSS art challenge. He actually had reached out to me about donating a copy of my book Move Things with CSS to use as a prize for the winner of the challenge — which I was more than happy to do! The first month’s challenge? Spring. And when thinking of what to make for the challenge, Slinkys immediately came to mind. You know Slinkys, right? That classic toy you knock down the stairs and it travels with its own momentum. A sl..

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According to Toshi Omagari, the author of Arcade Game Typography, the world’s first multi-colored digital font was created in 1982 for a never-released video game called Insector. Multi-colored fonts, sometimes called chromatic type, are still relatively rare on the web, even though the COLR font format has had full cross-browser support since 2018 (even in Internet Explorer!). The technology opens up an entirely new vein of typographic creativity. While some of the colo..

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By now, you are probably familiar with one or more programming languages. But have you ever wondered how you could create your own programming language? And by that, I mean: A programming language is any set of rules that convert strings to various kinds of machine code output. In short, a programming language is just a set of predefined rules. And to make them useful, you need something that understands those rules. And those things are compilers, interpreters, etc. So..

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AVIF (AV1 Image File Format) is a modern image file format specification for storing images that offer a much more significant file reduction when compared to other formats like JPG, JPEG, PNG, and WebP. Version 1.0.0 of the AVIF specification was finalized in February 2019 and released by Alliance for Open Media to the public. In this article, you will learn about some browser-based tools and command line tools for creating AVIF images. Why use AVIF over JPGs, PNGS..

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Let’s say you have a website built on a platform that excels at design and it’s available at example.com. But that platform falls short at blogging. So you think to yourself, “What if I could use a different blogging platform and make it available at example.com/blog?” Most people would tell you that goes against how DNS and websites are supposed to work and to use a subdomain instead. But there are benefits to keeping your content on the root domain that we just d..

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So, you’ve decided to build a blog with Next.js. Like any dev blogger, you’d like to have code snippets in your posts that are formatted nicely with syntax highlighting. Perhaps you also want to display line numbers in the snippets, and maybe even have the ability to call out certain lines of code. This post will show you how to get that set up, as well as some tips and tricks for getting these other features working. Some of it is tricker than you might expect. ..

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If you’ve spent time looking at open-source repos on GitHub, you’ve probably noticed that most of them use badges in their README files. Take the official React repository, for instance. There are GitHub badges all over the README file that communicate important dynamic info, like the latest released version and whether the current build is passing. Badges like these provide a nice way to highlight key information about a repository. You can even use yo..

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In design, reflections are stylized mirror images of objects. Even though they are not as popular as shadows, they have their moments — just think about the first time you explored the different font formats in MS Word or PowerPoint: I bet reflection was your second-most-used style, next to shadow, foregoing others like outline and glow. Or perhaps you remember when reflections were all the rage back when Apple used them on just about everything. Reflections are ..

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Howdy y’all! Unless you’ve been living under a rock (and maybe even then), you’ve undoubtedly heard the news that CSS-Tricks, was acquired by DigitalOcean. Congratulations to everyone! 🥳 As a little hurrah to commemorate the occasion, I wanted to create the DigitalOcean logo in CSS. I did that, but then took it a little further with some 3D and parallax. This also makes for quite a good article because the way I made the logo uses various pieces from previous arti..

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