A long requested CSS feature is to be able to create a “Masonry Layout” using pure CSS. Today we can already create a Masonry-like layout using grid-auto-flow: dense;, but unfortunately that’s not the real deal. 🤔 Masonry Layout? Masonry is a grid layout based on columns, as popularized by Pinterest. Unlike other grid layouts, it […]
Author Archives: Bramus!
Emoji Customizer created with CSS Variables
Fun pen by Jakob Eriksen in which he combines Emoji and CSS Custom Properties to create an Emoji Customizer. The reason that this works is because of the fact that emoji can have modifiers. Skin Tone and Hair, as used in the demo above, are such modifiers. Using the ZWJ (“\u200d”) you can glue all […]
How we Know the Distance to Stars
Johnny Harris, whom you might know from the Vox Borders series, on how we can possibly measure the distance to things a quadrillion km away.
How Flocking Birds Make Amazing Murmurations
TIL: Boids Algorithm. And yes, that’s implemented using <canvas>
Colors in CSS: Hello Space-Separated Functional Color Notations
The CSS Color Module Level 4 spec introduces a new way to define colors in CSS: Space-Separated Functional Color Notations. Start using them today!
Using React’s Key Attribute to remount a Component
Nik Graf details a little trick I also use from time to time: changing the key of a React component to force remount it. Upon clicking a contact in the list, the active contact’s id is used as the key for the Detail component. <Detail key={activeContact.id} contact={activeContact} /> Using React’s Key Attribute to remount a […]
JavaScript’s Syntactic Quirks
Jason Orendorff looked into the JS spec, in detail … JavaScript is rather hard to parse. Here is an in-depth accounting of its syntactic quirks, with an eye toward actually implementing a parser from scratch. One quirk most JS devs have will have certainly heard of is Automatic Semicolon Insertion (ASI). JavaScript’s Syntactic Quirks →
Using CSS to Control Text Selection
Will Boyd digs into the user-select CSS property: CSS lets you control how text selection behaves and appears on your pages. This can help you improve usability in certain situations and add a little bit of visual flair. Let’s dive in! His posts includes a very nice hack to make user-select: all; work only at […]
Responsive Images the Simple Way
The logic behind displaying an image responsively is complicated. It involves determining how large the image will be displayed, as well as understanding whether the user is on a high-resolution display, among other things. Thankfully, the browser is better equipped than we are to handle this logic. All we need to do is give it […]
The 8-bit Arcade Font, Deconstructed
In his book Arcade Game Typography designer Toshi Omagari breaks down the evolution, design, and history of arcade game fonts. In this video from the Vox by Design series he’s interviewed and asked about his favorite 8-bit fonts. Video game designers of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s faced color and resolution limitations that stimulated incredible […]