Friday, March 29
Remote Conferences; Bridging the Gap, Clearing the Odds
CSS Tricks

Remote Conferences; Bridging the Gap, Clearing the Odds

A few weeks back, I saw one of my esteemed mentors decry the psychological traumas he had experienced, following series and series of refusals at certain embassies. “A child concentrating hard at school” by Les Anderson on UnsplashYou would think he went for a contract he did not have the capacity for, but then, you would have been wrong. He needed to impart knowledge. He opted to do so across borders, but then, some realities were harsh. We are fighting just the police for mistaking techies and related careers as fraudsters when we have a much bigger problem #thread — Christian Nwamba (@codebeast) June 3, 2018 Borders and geographical constraints can cause a lot of havoc. However, it can only do so, when the full discovery of a better way to impart knowledge across borders has not been ...
The Holy Grail Of Reusable Components: Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, And NPM
Web Tricks

The Holy Grail Of Reusable Components: Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, And NPM

The Holy Grail Of Reusable Components: Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, And NPMThe Holy Grail Of Reusable Components: Custom Elements, Shadow DOM, And NPM Oliver Williams 2018-07-16T13:30:58+02:00 2018-07-16T17:29:08+00:00 For even the simplest of components, the cost in human-labour may have been significant. UX teams do usability testing. An array of stakeholders have to sign off on the design. Developers conduct AB tests, accessibility audits, unit tests and cross-browser checks. Once you’ve solved a problem, you don’t want to repeat that effort. By building a reusable component library (rather than building everything from scratch), we can continuously utilize...
What’s New for Designers, July 2018
Web Tricks

What’s New for Designers, July 2018

What kind of projects are you working on? It might be the hotter days (with more time at a computer) that have me focused on ways to enhance productivity. In this month’s roundup of new design tools and information, you’ll find plenty of helpful items that relate to workflow. If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @carriecousins to be considered! UnDraw UnDraw is a curated collection of SVG images that you can use for free, without attribution. All of the images fall under the MIT license and the site is packed with scalable images for web projects. Embed tiny SVGs or edit the code and make each image your own before adding it to your design...
Popular Design News of the Week: July 9, 2018 – July 15, 2018
Web Tricks

Popular Design News of the Week: July 9, 2018 – July 15, 2018

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news. Visual System   You Know a Web Site Sucks If…   Physics-Based Background Scroll Effects   Unused   Visitors – Google Analytics in your Menu Bar   Getting a 99/100 Google PageSpeed ...
Web Tricks

Why 'This' in JavaScript

While JavaScript is a fun and powerful language, it can be tricky and requires a proper understanding of its underlying principles to mitigate common errors. In this post, we shall be introducing you to the this keyword, its behaviour and the hard choices behind it. These will be detailed using appropriate examples to better drive home the point. What is this? Developers make the mistake of thinking that this refers to the “scope” of the function within which it's encountered. This isn’t true because whenever a function is invoked, it runs in a new execution context until its execution is completed. Each execution context usually references an object and the value of that object translates to the value of this. For us to properly understand what this is, we would first need to go over two ...
Comics of the Week #237
Web Tricks

Comics of the Week #237

Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD. The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers. These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today. So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons. Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own… No extra costs You get what you pay for   Low tech budget Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below… Add Realistic Chalk and Sketch Lettering Effects with Sketch’it – only $5! ...
CSS Tricks

The div that looks different in every browser

It's not that Martijn Cuppens used User Agent sniffing, CSS hacks, or anything like that to make this quirk div. This is just a plain ol' <div> using the outline property a la: div { inset 100px green; outline-offset: -125px; } It looks different in different browsers because browsers literally render something differently in this strange situation. I happened upon Reddit user spidermonk33's comment in which they animated the offset to understand it a bit more. I took that idea and made this little video to show them behaving even weirder than the snapshots. Direct Link to Article — PermalinkThe post The div that looks different in every browser appeared first on CSS-Tricks. Source: CSS-tricks.com
CSS Tricks

Scrolling Gradient

If you want a gradient that changes as you scroll down a very long page, you can create a gradient with a bunch of color stops, apply it to the body and it will do just that. But, what if you don't want a perfectly vertical gradient? Like you want just the top left corner to change color? Mike Riethmuller, re-using his own technique from the CSS-only scroll indicator (A-grade CSS trickery), did this by overlapping two gradients. The "top" one is fixed position and sort of leaves a hole that another taller gradient peeks through from below on scroll. Direct Link to Article — PermalinkThe post Scrolling Gradient appeared first on CSS-Tricks. Source: CSS-tricks.com
Anatomy of a malicious script: how a website can take over your browser
CSS Tricks

Anatomy of a malicious script: how a website can take over your browser

By now, we all know that the major tech behemoths like Facebook or Google know everything about our lives, including how often we go to the bathroom (hence all the prostate medication ads that keep popping up, even on reputable news sites). After all, we’ve given them permission to do so, by reading pages and pages of legalese in their T&C pages (we all did, didn’t we?) and clicking on the "Accept" button. But what can a site do to you, or to your device, without your explicit consent? What happens when you visit a slightly "improper" site, or a "proper" site you visited includes some third-party script that hasn’t been thoroughly checked? Has it ever happened to you that your browser gets hijacked and innumerable pop-ups come up, and you seem to be unable to close them without quitti...
Monthly Web Development Update 7/2018: Practical Accessibility, Design Mistakes, And Feature Control
Web Tricks

Monthly Web Development Update 7/2018: Practical Accessibility, Design Mistakes, And Feature Control

Monthly Web Development Update 7/2018: Practical Accessibility, Design Mistakes, And Feature ControlMonthly Web Development Update 7/2018: Practical Accessibility, Design Mistakes, And Feature Control Anselm Hannemann 2018-07-13T14:20:17+02:00 2018-07-13T12:33:42+00:00 The web continues to amaze me. With all its variety and different changes to the platform, it’s hard to see a straight pattern — if there even is (just) one. But it’s wonderful to see what is being changed, which features are added to the platform, which ones get deprecated, and how browsers implement more and more technology to protect the user from malicious website attacks. It’s interesting to...
Help! I Can’t Stop Wasting Time…
Web Tricks

Help! I Can’t Stop Wasting Time…

There are so many distractions when you are a freelancer. From kids coming into your home office or time sucks like Facebook, you need to focus and be more efficient. The key is arming yourself with the right tools for the job. Here, we’ve gathered a list of online time savers (productivity tools for the win!) plus tips for managing distractions. Create the Right Working Space Freelancers, if you want to work from home, you need an actual work space. Using the kitchen counter or just putting a desk in your bedroom is a recipe for distraction. (You’ll see the dishes piled up or find 10 other things that need your attention when what you should be doing is working.) Create a dedicated workspace—preferably one with a door and that isn’t used for anything else. Look for a room with a window. ...
CSS Tricks

Design Systems at GitHub

Here’s a nifty post by Diana Mounter all about the design systems team at GitHub that details how the team was formed, the problems they've faced and how they've adapted along the way: When I started working at GitHub in late 2015, I noticed that there were many undocumented patterns, I had to write a lot of new CSS to implement designs, and that there weren’t obvious underlying systems connecting all the pieces together. I knew things could be better and I was enthusiastic about making improvements—I quickly discovered that I wasn’t the only one that felt this way. There were several folks working on efforts to improve things, but weren’t working together. With support from design leads, a group of us started to meet regularly to discuss improvements to Primer and prioritize work—this was...
CSS Tricks

Building a Complex UI Animation in React, Simply

Let’s use React, styled-components, and react-flip-toolkit to make our own version of the animated navigation menu on the Stripe homepage. It's an impressive menu with some slick animation effects and the combination of these three tools can make it relatively easy to recreate. This is an intermediate-level walkthrough that assumes familiarity with React and basic animation concepts. Our React guide is a good place to start. Here's what we're aiming to make: See the Pen React Stripe Menu by Alex (@aholachek) on CodePen. View Repo Breaking down the animation First, let's break down the animation into different parts so we can more easily reproduce it. You might want to check out the finished product in slow motion (use the toggles) so you can catch all the details. The white dropdown conta...
Fast, Good, Local Site Search with Jetpack
CSS Tricks

Fast, Good, Local Site Search with Jetpack

If you have, say, 20 posts/pages on your WordPress site, the search functionality that is baked right into your self-hosted WordPress site will probably do a great job. Search is a pretty cool feature to ship with WordPress, truth be told. But as a site grows, you'll find limits. How it works behind the scenes is a touch over my head, but as I understand it, it does a MySQL LIKE query on your post titles and post content. It tries its best to order by relevance (like if it finds an exact sentence match), then largely orders by date. If search is super important to your site (here on CSS-Tricks, on-site search gets used a ton) you'll probably look for other options. TLDR: Jetpack Search is quite good out of the box, customizable, and requires very little effort. A quick jaunt through a de...
Writing for the Modern Minimalist Website
Web Tricks

Writing for the Modern Minimalist Website

They say that an image is worth a thousand words, and web designers certainly seem to have taken it to heart: the trend for image-rich, stylised page design means that there is now often little room for writing on a web page. Looking at recent trends in web design, we see full-screen photos, minimalist split-screens and enticing overlays. It’s all very visual, and not one of the examples contains many words on the featured pages. These trends are great for designers, who can let their creativity flow without being burdened by the need to include dull tracts of text. On the other hand, although these sites can undoubtedly be beautiful, the trend is dividing experts: many feel that by carrying little text, sites are losing the key function of being informative about a product or service. Th...