October 20, 2023
Angular provides many ways to animate things. In this post we are going to look specifically at adding :enter and :leave animations to a component as it gets added and removed from the UI. We’re going to do this with the Angular @HostBinding decorator and the enter and leave aliases for animations. Alright, let’s check it out!
October 13, 2023
Are you running into scenarios where you have a single line of text that can get too long and you want to truncate it? How about multiple lines that you want to constrain to a known number of lines and then truncate? Well, in this post I’ll show you how to do both with nothing but CSS. Let’s check it out!
October 05, 2023
Most of the time, when creating responsive applications in Angular, we just need to use CSS and media queries. Every once in a while though, we need to alter some interactivity or logic based on these same media queries. Meaning, we need to access them in some way from JavaScript. And this can get a little messy sometimes. Luckily for us, we can use the Breakpoint Observer utility provided by the Angular CDK. Let’s check it out!
September 29, 2023
With CSS grid we can do some pretty amazing things. We can easily place items in the center of containers. We can stack items without positioning. We can create complex layouts quickly with ease. And, we can even animate to unknown heights which used to be near impossible without using Javascript. So, in this post we’ll look at a few of my favorite grid provided abilities. Alright, let’s get to it!
September 15, 2023
As people who use HTML and CSS to build things for the web, we run into difficult challenges daily. Sometimes things seem so easy but end up being a real pain in the butt. Well, I’m here to help… at least a little bit… well hopefully. In this post I’m going to show you how I’ve solved three pretty common design issues in the past with CSS masks.
September 08, 2023
Sometimes we need to react to certain events in the browser and write code against them. Maybe we need to listen to a click, input change, focus, or blur. Maybe we need to do something like listen for a click anywhere within the document. Well, good news, we’ve got many ways to do this in Angular. In this post I’m going to show you four common ways.
September 01, 2023
Hey there, have you ever needed to programmatically add a class to an element in an Angular application? Like, maybe when a button is disabled, we need a class, but then once it’s enabled, we don’t. Or how about when a form goes from an invalid state to valid? Well, good news, this is actually pretty easy to do in angular. In this post I’m going to show you four different ways. First we’ll use a method called class binding. Next we’ll use the ngClass directive. After that we’ll use the @HostBinding decorator. And finally, we’ll use the Renderer2 addClass() and removeClass() methods. Let’s get to it!
August 27, 2023
When it comes to incorporating irregular shaped text into web projects, we often end up using images. However, there may be a better way – using inline SVG and CSS to create dynamic, responsive, and accessible graphics directly within our HTML. In this post, we'll walk you through the process of achieving this, ensuring our designs are on point while maintaining accessibility and SEO friendliness.
August 22, 2023
HTML radio buttons are a staple of web forms, but their default appearance leaves much to be desired. In this blog post, we'll walk through one of my favorite methods to customize the look of radio buttons using CSS, creating a more user-friendly and visually appealing experience.
August 21, 2016
For the longest time we’ve been stuck with boxes and it makes things that are common yet beautiful in the print world difficult if not impossible on the web. CSS shapes change this, leveling the playing field allowing us to create much more engaging layouts and designs on the web.
January 28, 2016
I was lucky enough to get the invite from Matt West, founder/organizer of CodeSLO, via my coworker @schwarty to give a presentation at the CodeSLO meetup "HTML and CSS - Part 3 - Modern Web Design" meet up. This was a good time. I got to get out and talk shop with a great group of people who were excited to learn about design and the role it plays on the web. My talk went a little over thirty minutes and covered the basic principles of good design: contrast, repetition, proximity, alignment, layout, typography, color, and more. For those that were unable to attend, feel free to take a look at the slides to see what you missed...
February 09, 2015
Sometimes it's necessary to have a link that contains some children elements. Say, for example, you have a link that contains some text and an inline SVG icon that's styled using CSS. This set up allows you to style the icon for all of the link states `:hover`, `:visited`, and `:active` right? Well yes, with the exception of the `:active` state in Internet Explorer. Well, not without a work around at least.
June 06, 2014
We are all designing and building responsive websites now. For many of us this means both exciting new challenges and significant increases to our workload. Testing at many variable widths is more and more difficult to do and is likely the culprit of much of our increase in development time.
June 03, 2014
You've likely seen CSS animations and transitions in various web applications out there where they just didn't work well. They are choppy and freeze along with a bunch of other issues. This occurs because they are not taking advantage of the device GPU and hardware acceleration, but are instead using the browsers' built in rendering engine.
May 30, 2014
For those of us who are used to working with XHTML this is going to seem a little odd but, with HTML5, we no longer need to add a trailing slash on self closing tags like images and inputs.
May 28, 2014
With all of the great frameworks popping up it can be difficult to choose the "right" one. Besides doing some really great things, probably the two most popular frameworks [Twitter Bootstrap](http://getbootstrap.com/2.3.2/) and [Zurb Foundation](http://foundation.zurb.com/), can be a little overreaching at times when it comes to theming them. You may find that you have to overwrite and undo many styles to make them look unique. This is where web developer [James South's](https://twitter.com/James_M_South) [Responsive Boilerplate](http://responsivebp.com/) may prove to be that "right" one.
May 27, 2014
Now that there are so many people accessing the sites we build through touch devices many of us will see that we need to alter the default panning and zooming behavior of the browser when touching them.
May 23, 2014
If you use Illustrator for interface design you probably take advantage of using placed files for some of your design elements. I've started using the heck out of them in order to make updating items across files much easier and quicker. As I started doing this I quickly realized that it's monotonous to update the placed files manually after making edits to them. Well, there's good news, you can set Illustrator to automatically updated them for you.
May 21, 2014
It used to be that websites and their interactions were much different than those from native software applications. Well this is not so much the case anymore. [Mary Lou](http://tympanus.net/codrops/author/crnacura/), a freelance web designer and developer from [tympanus.net](http://tympanus.net/), wrote an interesting article discussing a few different morphing buttons concepts that showcase some amazing possibilities for web interactions.
May 20, 2014
Have you ever attempted to use a condensed or expanded font face from a particular font family using CSS? How did you do it? Did you create a new web font with a subset of the condensed or expanded versions? Well, thanks to CSS3 there's now a better way, [sort of](#sortof).