Generative design with CSS Houdini

Recording of George Francis giving his talk “Generative design with CSS Houdini” at the most recent edition of London CSS Learn how the mystical powers of CSS Houdini can be harnessed to create ever-unique, generative user interfaces — think random patterns, shapes, animations, and more! Related: Random Paint Effects with Houdini

A Guide To CSS Debugging

Over at Smashing Magazine, Stephanie Eckles has published an extensive piece on CSS Debugging. In my experience, CSS layout issues often fall out of one of the following categories: Overflow of content from its parent resulting in extra or unexpected scrollbars and content being pushed out of the regular viewport area. Inheriting browser inconsistencies leading …

Conditional Border Radius In CSS

Ahmad Shadeed recently spotted this declaration in Facebook’s CSS: .card { border-radius: max(0px, min(8px, calc((100vw – 4px – 100%) * 9999))); } It’s a really interesting piece of code, which acts as a toggle to only show rounded corners in case the element does not entirely span the viewport width. We don’t want rounded corners …

CodeSwing — Interactive Coding Playground (like CodePen, JSFiddle, etc.) Extension for Visual Studio Code

The Visual Studio Code extension named “CodeSwing” just blew my socks off. CodeSwing is an interactive coding playground for VS Code, that allows you to build/explore/learn rich web applications (“swings”). It’s like having the magic of a traditional web playground (e.g. CodePen, JSFiddle), but in Visual Studio Code! Using the Command Palette you can create …

CSS initial doesn’t do what you think it does

Another great video by Kevin Powell on one of those things in CSS that many may have heard of, but most likely don’t understand entirely (I know I didn’t for a very long time 😅). We often think initial sets something back to how it started, but it actually does a lot more than that. …

Designing Beautiful Shadows in CSS

Adding shadows on the web isn’t that hard: slap a CSS box-shadow onto an element and you’re done. But as Josh W. Comeau points out, making a good, life-like, shadow is hard. When I look around the web, though, it’s clear that most shadows aren’t as rich as they could be. The web is covered …

CSS Circle Focus Effect

Very rad demo by Adam Argyle, which gives you a Spotlight / Focus effect upon pressing the Option/Alt key. Also works on Mobile. (Focus the CodePen embed first) See the Pen Radial focus effect with mask-image by Adam Argyle (@argyleink) on CodePen. It basically is a fixed grey overlay with a mask-image on top that …