Grainy Gradients
Browse through Dribbble or Behance, and you’ll find designers using a simple technique to add texture to an image: noise. Adding noise makes otherwise solid colors or smooth gradients, such as shadows, more realistic. But despite designers’ affinity for texture, noise is rarely used in web design. In this article, we’ll generate colorful noise to add texture to a gradient with only a small amount of CSS and SVG. Alright, let’s make some noise! Illustration..
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Social Image Generator + Jetpack
I feel like my quest to make sure this site had pretty sweet (and automatically-generated) social media images (e.g. Open Graph) came to a close once I found Social Image Generator. The trajectory there was that I ended up talking about it far too much on ShopTalk, to the point it became a common topic in our Discord (join via Patreon), Andy Bell pointed me at Daniel Post’s Social Image Generator and I immediately bought and installed it. I heard from Daniel over Twitte..
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“Just in Time” CSS
I believe acss.io is the first usage of “Atomic CSS” where the point of it is to be a compiler. You write CSS like this: <div class="C(#fff) P(20px)"> text </div> And it will generate CSS like: .C(#333) { color: #333; } .P(20px) { padding: 20px; } (Or something like that.) The point is that it only generates the CSS that you actually need, because you asked for it, and no more. The result is far less CSS than you’d see in an average ..
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Fun Times Styling Checkbox States
We might leave a text input unstyled. We might leave a link unstyled. Even a button. But checkboxes… we don’t leave them alone. That’s why styling checkboxes never gets old. Although designing checkboxes is not that complicated, we also don’t have to settle for simple background color changes, or adding and removing borders, to indicate state changes. We also don’t have to pull out any fancy design skills — that we don’t possess — to make this work. I’ll ..
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EyeDropper API Dropped
I had no idea this was coming but it’s pretty neat! Chrome has shipped the EyeDropper API in v95 (Canary, as I write). 🎨 Loving the new `EyeDropper` Web API: “`jsawait new EyeDropper().open();// Returns the picked color, e.g.,// { "sRGBHex": "#ddd9e0" }“`Try it in Chrome 95. pic.twitter.com/990uyvOngp— Thomas Steiner (@tomayac) September 1, 2021 EyeDropper API is now available on @googlechrome canary (95), super cool way to create a "color pick..
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Frameworks Helping Image Usage
I recently blogged about how images are hard and it ended up being a big ol’ checklist of things that you could/should think about and implement when placing images on websites. I think it’s encouraging to see frameworks — these beloved tools that we leverage to help us build websites — offering additional tools within them to help tackle this checklist and take on the hard (but perfectly suited for computers) tasks of displaying images. Some exampl..
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Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) on Your Website With Ease
(This is a sponsored post.) Optimizing the user experience you offer on your website is essential for the success of any online business. Google does use different user experience-related metrics to rank web pages for SEO and has continued to provide multiple tools to measure and improve web performance. In its recent attempt to simplify the measurement and understanding of what qualifies as a good user experience, Google standardized the page’s user experience metrics. ..
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Mars Theme: A Deep Look at Frontity’s Headless WordPress Theme
This post was in progress before Automattic acquired Frontity and its entire team. According to Frontity’s founders, the framework will be transitioned into a community-led project and leave the project in “a stable, bug-free position” with documentation and features. Like other open-source community projects, Frontity will remain free as it has been, with opportunities to contribute to the project and make it an even better framework for decoupled WordPress. More deta..
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Don’t attach tooltips to document.body
Here’s Atif Afzal on using a <div> that is permanently on the page where tooltips are added/removed and how they perform vastly better than plopping those same tooltips right into the <body>. It’s not really discussed, but the reason you put them that high-up in the DOM is so you can absolutely position them exactly where you need to on the page without having to deal with hidden overflow or relative parents and the like. To my amazement, just having a ..
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The Story Behind TryShape, a Showcase for the CSS clip-path property
I love shapes, especially colorful ones! Shapes on websites are in the same category of helpfulness as background colors, images, banners, section separators, artwork, and many more: they can help us understand context and inform our actions through affordances. A few months back, I built an application to engage my 7-year old daughter with mathematics. Apart from basic addition and subtraction, my aim was to present questions using shapes. That’s when I got familiar wit..
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