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.
Every time I go to design a new site I jump directly into PhotoShop because, well, it's the tool I've used since the very first site I designed as a professional. I know it very well and can move quickly and efficiently.
Ever wish that you could create high fidelity design mock-ups with the ability to make global color changes? Well, with Illustrator you can do exactly that.
Getting tired of those ugly old school WYSIWYG editors that have every setting under the sun? I know I am. Well, there are some other great solutions out there and jQuery Notebook is one of them.
Modular is the new black when speaking in terms of the web. From the back-end perspective, developers have been building modular, object-oriented code for a long time now. Well, as web technologies and our development processes continue to improve, more and more of these back-end, programmatic philosophies are finding their way into front-end development.
You can now place PhotoShop documents within other PhotoShop documents. This is awesome when you are in the process of mocking up large scale applications consisting of common components like site headers, footers, navigation, etc. It also helps to keep these design elements consistent when developing with a team of designers.
Media queries are great and they have become the standard for responsive web design. They provide us the ability take control of our designs and dramatically change the way they look across a wide array of view port dimensions and devices. They are not without issues however. They are are only concerned with the width of the view port and not the width of containing elements.
For the longest time the only pseudo selectors that we could use were :link, :hover, :visited and :active and they could only be applied to a tags. As long as we were intending to support ie6 that was all we could do. As we've adopted philosophies like progressive enhancement, graceful degradation, or dropped support for ie6, 7, and 8 we have seen the landscape of CSS selectors change dramatically.