Blogging and all that Malarkey

People don’t buy products from companies they don’t trust. That might sound obvious, but it’s remarkable how many technical websites expect visitors to decode specifications, compare unfamiliar part numbers, and somehow arrive at the right decision on their own.

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.

People don’t buy products from companies they don’t trust. That might sound obvious, but it’s remarkable how many technical websites expect visitors to decode specifications, compare unfamiliar part numbers, and somehow arrive at the right decision on their own.

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.”

I’d been tinkering with animations last week and wondered what else I could do with my Magnificent 7 characters. I love surprising people with hidden Easter Eggs, so I decided to use them in a little hidden game.