Blogging and all that Malarkey

You know what it’s like. You decide to make a fun little side project. No need to integrate it into your main codebase. It doesn’t have to have compatible CSS or HTML, so no worries. Then you make another one. Same deal. Then another. Oh. All of a sudden, you have several projects, and there are annoying differences between them.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “I spend an unhealthy amount of time on the typography in my designs, and if you’ve read any traditional typography books, you might remember “the measure.” If not, it’s simply the length of a line of text. But measure means more than that, and once you understand what it represents, it can change how you think about layout entirely.”

I’m not entirely sure how it happened, but it was yours truly’s 60th last week. I spent it in Germany with Sue and Alex and one of the highlights of the trip was buying a watch to celebrate that big birthday.

Last week, I explained my strategy for writing CSS selectors. Today, I’ll explain how I decide on and design layouts. It isn’t really about grids; it’s about a repeatable way to make layout decisions.

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “SVG is one of those web technologies that’s both elegant and, at times, infuriating. In this article, pioneering author and web designer Andy Clarke explains his technique for animating SVG elements that are hidden in the Shadow DOM.”

Writing good CSS is all about restraint. As an example, I used to over-specify too many things in my stylesheets. It was a bad habit picked up from BEM, OOCSS, and from developers who flattened everything with classes to dodge specificity. Now I think of my CSS selector strategy as a “progressive narrowing of scope.”

When I’ve had a few spare minutes, I’ve been adding to and optimising my Magnificent 7 character animations to improve rendering speed. Then I had the idea to build a silly fairground-style shooting game, and I set myself the challenge of keeping it as small as possible.

In this episode of Unfinished Business, Andy and Rich talk about contracts, how they use them, and some of the pitfalls they’ve both experienced.

Yours truly over at CSS Tricks: “Over the past few months, I’ve explored how we can get creative using well-supported CSS properties. Each article is intended to nudge web design away from uniformity, toward designs that are more distinctive and memorable. One bit of feedback deserves a follow up.”

Yours truly over at the Smashing Magazine: “Ambient animations are subtle, slow-moving details that add atmosphere without stealing the show. In part two of his series, web design pioneer Andy Clarke shows how ambient animations can add personality to any website design.”