Learn the latest tips, techniques, and approaches for laying out your websites with CSS and stylesheets.
It’s been a while since we polished our HTML and CSS skills with a fun little demo, let’s end that streak with a project that’s both super attractive and super practical.
Today we’re going to build a card-style “Hire Me” widget that you can quickly drop onto any web page. Along the way we’ll learn a bunch of great stuff about CSS positioning and how to use pseudo elements to pull off some cool effects.
Typically web developers have been using JavaScript to create dynamic page animations. Hidden menus and subnavigation are just a couple examples for how these techniques would be used on a live website. Thanks to the addition of CSS3 transitions we can now mimic these animations, with no JavaScript in sight.
In this tutorial I want to demonstrate how to build an inner hidden content bar which slides down when hovering. You can place this into your header, footer, or even somewhere inside the page content. It is a very flexible technique which does not require a whole lot of time to get working. Plus all the modern web browsers will support CSS3 transition effects.
In case you haven’t noticed, square avatars are so 2010. These days circles are all the rage. Every app worth its salt, from Path to Basecamp, is jumping on board this fad and waving goodbye to the squares who are stuck in the past.
Ever the forward thinker, I asked myself, “what’s next?” Let’s look beyond squares and circles and into the future of the avatar! Using CSS and Webkit, we can use pretty much any shape as the mask for an avatar. Let’s see how.
CSS specificity is a topic that many new front end coders avoid for as long as possible. It sounds complicated, there are all of these rules, you might even have to do some math! How lame is that?
Ultimately, you can only avoid it for so long. Specificity is an essential concept that you need to grasp to be an effective developer. Today I’ll walk you through the concepts of specificity in a simple and easy to understand manner. It’s easier than you think!
Modern web design techniques have allowed developers to quickly implement animations supported by most browsers. I think alert messages are very commonplace, because the default JavaScript alert boxes tend to be pretty intrusive and poorly designed. This leads developers down a path to figure out which solutions would work out better for a more user-friendly interface.
For this tutorial I want to explain how we can put together CSS3 notification boxes which appear at the top of the page body. Users may then click on the notifications to have them fade away and eventually remove them from the DOM. As a fun added feature, I have also included buttons where you may click to append a new alert box into the top of the page. Check out my sample demo to get a better idea of what we’ll be making.
A common user interface style for Apple and WordPress has been the expanding search field. Whenever a user clicks to focus, the field will expand wider, then contracts when the user de-focuses. This technique has become popular because it saves room on your page when the search isn’t being used. But it also highlights the search field when it is in use, which catches the user’s attention and lets them know the website is responding.
In this tutorial I want to demonstrate two different methods for building an expanding search field. The first is using basic CSS3 transitions which are only supported in newer web browsers. This works great for simple designs, but there is no way to check if the user has entered data strictly via CSS. In the second field we will use JavaScript to expand, and then only shrink back if the user hasn’t entered any text. It is a small yet fascinating piece of UI which can blend nicely into any website project.
After a long period of researching mobile responsive layouts, I’m spent quite a bit of time experimenting with various UI designs. One major hotspot on the page is often the website’s main navigation. Users want quick access to your content pages — and this will always be the case, either on a full monitor or a smaller mobile responsive screen.
For this tutorial I want to demonstrate how we can use a combination of CSS3 media queries along with some jQuery to manage a sliding navigation menu. The links will appear as normal on the frontend but drop into a hidden menu after resizing below 600px. Instead we see a little menu pull-down icon which will toggle open and closed on command.
There’s a general trend towards smaller “column listings” in homepage layouts. Specifically, tech startups and landing pages use this effect for promoting features in their products. But it’s a neat little design layout style for any purpose, and using icons in your design will break away from the normal template designs for an intriguing list display.
In this tutorial I want to demonstrate how we can use custom CSS3 webfonts as an icon inside the HTML. We will create a very basic startup website using the two-column list approach. All of the CSS is very straightforward, although you may need to do a bit of research on some of the properties. This effect is native to all standards-compliant browsers and renders perfectly on OS X or Windows.
The practice of implementing responsive images is still in its infancy. We’ve seen a lot of ideas and suggestions for how it should be done and we’re bound to see a lot more.
Today we’re going to look at a fascinating little framework that allows you to not only automatically resize your images when the viewport changes, but also crop the images with a specific important focal point in mind. Amazingly enough, it does all this with pure CSS. Read on to see how it works.
Designers may have noticed an ever-increasing use of CSS3 transition properties. Website interfaces have been dramatically improved with custom animation styles, all without the need for JavaScript (when used sensibly, of course!)
In this tutorial I want to demonstrate how we can build animation effects in HTML5 input fields. I’ll be designing a simple contact form with a couple of fields and a textarea. Using the CSS3 :valid pseudo class it is easier than ever to customize text inputs. Check out my live demo example to get an idea of what the final product looks like.
More and more lately I’ve seen developers utilizing tricks to create toggle states using pure CSS. This allows you to skip the JavaScript without sacrificing the interaction. How does this work? Is it an acceptable practice?
Today we’re going to examine two distinct methods for utilizing a checkbox to create a click event that swaps between two images using good old HTML and CSS. We’ll finish off with a brief discussion on semantics and the pros/cons of this technique.
Recently, we took a dive into the very core concepts behind CSS layout and explored the differences between absolute and relative positioning. We’re going to follow that up with another CSS layout talk, this time based around a fundamental question that almost every new developer asks: how do you center something?
There are a bunch of different types of web elements and layout situations, each calling for a unique solution for centering (both vertically and horizontally). Today we’ll go over a bunch of these scenarios so you can wrap your mind around how they work and come away with the confidence to center anything!