If you're reading my blog I'll assume that you are familiar with how to live edit code within all browser developer tools. I use them all the time and can hardly remember what it was like without them. Chrome DevTools tend to be my favorite but FireFox and Internet Explorer continue to improve.
Paul Irish created and maintains a site devoted to Ampersands. The site is a collection of open source web fonts that only contain the ampersand character. He created it based off an [article from 2008](http://simplebits.com/notebook/2008/08/14/ampersands-2/) regarding the usage of ampersands and the fact that certain variants of the character in some fonts are more interesting than others. The article also points out that the ampersand character is often used only for display purposes and not in content so there is no reason not to use more interesting versions.
CSS provides us with a handful of pseudo classes that are specific to HTML5 forms. They allow us to create forms that are easier to fill out by highlighting fields that are required, optional, valid, invalid, etc.
With HTML5 we have been given new input types (email, tel, url, number, etc.) and built in browser validation to validate them. This is great but you may want to disable this validation if you want to test your server side validation, use custom validation, or something else.
For those of you who have taken advantage of web fonts you've likely noticed various levels of quality. Sometimes, in some browsers, they look great. Other times, in other browsers, they look thin grainy. And if you're like me you probably just cringed a little and dealt with it. Well, fortunately we now have help thanks to [Alfred Xing](http://alfredxing.com/) who has created [Brick](http://brick.im/).
Back in the good ol' days, CSS was much more limited than it is today. If we needed to style something it had to be in the page which, in turn, led to bloated markup simply for design purposes. Luckily we are no longer in those days.
The ng-cloak directive was added to Angular in order to prevent the flickering of elements before your application has fully loaded. It then removes ng-cloak once it has had a chance to compile your views. However, there is still a flicker issue that occurs between when the view is first loaded and before Angular has had a chance to run.
We pick up lots of pieces of knowledge over time when working with CSS and then if we don't use them often we can forget how to use them and then have to spend time either looking it up again or looking for where we used them in other projects.
No, this is not a hip hop song about SVGs, sorry to those of you who were expecting that. This is another post about good ol' SVG graphics. So most of us know that there is a lot that you can do with SVGs and it can all be done in many different ways. The SVG `defs` element can be used to make SVG code simpler, cleaner, and better.
When you create a new Illustrator document the grid will always be aligned based off the upper left corner of the art board. Personally, I always want it to be aligned to the top center. How do you do that? Well, the simplest way that I've found is to actually just center the art board.
If you're ready to build out your next site using flexbox you are probably going to want to use a grid. Well, you're in luck because [Kristofer Joseph](https://twitter.com/dam) has created [Flexbox Grid](http://flexboxgrid.com/) with many of the features that you're used to with other div based grids and more.
The :root pseudo class, at first glance, is a little odd. It seems like it's simply a replacement for using the HTML tag as a CSS selector. There's a little bit more to it than that and in this article I will explain what the :root pseudo class is and why you might use it.
If you've ever wanted to do something like set the borders on a container to the same color as the text within it you can easily do it using currentColor.
Subtlepatterns.com is a great free resource for high quality repeating backgrounds for use in your designs. It was created and is actively maintained by Atle Mo.
I have been using CSS background properties for quite a few years and have only used what I have needed. There are some pretty cool things that can be done with backgrounds that I was not so familiar with. In this article I'll highlight some of these not so common options.
Ever needed to quickly and precisely round corners on vector shapes and typography already added to your designs in illustrator? Well, it's pretty easy to do nowadays.
If you've ever created an SVG image in Adobe Illustrator you've seen some pretty crazy code. Just like all other code we write, it should be simple, clean, and lean. Also, like any other image type we want to make sure that it is optimized and has the highest quality with the smallest file size.
AngularJS is a newer JavaScript framework geared towards the creation and maintenance of single page web applications. It is considered to be a “toolset for building the framework most suited to your application development” meaning that, for the most part, you can choose the elements that you want to use and swap out those that you don’t want with other libraries/frameworks of your choice. It is built and maintained by Google and is open source with an MIT license.
Often when creating a web design mock-up you'll have the need to wrap text around objects. Illustrator makes this very quick and easy to do.
Do you ever use browser developer tools just to figure out what fonts and font styles are being applied on your site and perhaps others? Well, there's an easier way thanks to Chengyin Liu an engineer at Backplane. He has created the Whatfont Bookmarklet extension for Chrome.