For my final project in this class, I wanted to redesign the website of New Wave Coffee in Logan Square (where I am currently enjoying a cup of coffee and editing my blog). Their current site consists only of their logo, their hours, their address, and their phone number. I felt they should have a little bit more robust website.
Category Archives: CSS
EXTRA CREDIT: OpenType features and the web
I ran across an article on the TypeKit Practice blog about OpenType features and how to enable and use them on the web.
OpenType features are more than just fancy swashes, they’re the superpowers of fonts! The best typefaces are full of sophisticated reasoning and little surprises — things that are often integral to the design of the typeface itself, or that help it work better for specific typesetting tasks. Being a graphic design student, I can appreciate the nuances of ligatures and old style numbers, and have always struggled to bring these same features from print over to the web.
Awesome CSS drop shadows
You can create beautiful drop shadows in CSS without the need for images (you know, like back in the olden days). With just a little CSS, you can create a few different drop shadow effects, like lifted paper drop shadows, perspective drop shadows, horizontal curved drop shadows, and vertical curved drop shadows. The example code is taken from a drop shadow demo page from a few years ago.
Update: Working with flexbox
I’ve been working on my final project website, and have decided to incorporate flexbox into my project. I’m surprised at how easy it’s been to work with once I got over the learning curve. Fortunately, the learning curve isn’t that steep.
More Flexbox: A complete guide
In case you didn’t get enough flexbox from the Smashing Magazine article in my last post, our friends at CSS Tricks have “A Complete Guide to Flexbox” waiting for you. There are plenty of how-tos and coding examples. I’m super-eager to get my hands dirty and implement flexbox into my next project!
Forget floats and margin tricks. Flexbox is here!
I ran across an interesting article on Smashing Magazine that might just change everything. Flexbox is here, and we should all be using it now! CanIUse.com reports that flexbox is supported across all major current browsers. According to the Smashing article:
The days of floats and margin trickery are finally behind us, as CSS furnishes developers with new and improved properties perfect for those delicate layouts. Layout features such as vertical alignment, evenly distributed spacing, source-order control and other patterns such as “sticky” footers are quite effortless to achieve with flexbox.
Flexbox looks like an absolute game-changer. I will admit that I haven’t yet tried it, but am eager to try it out and use it. Anyone else have any experience with flexbox?
Printing with CSS?!? No way! YES WAY!!
So you have designed a spiffy new website for a client. For argument’s sake, let’s say it’s a restaurant. Everything is there, the menu, specials, location, hours, etc. It looks great, at least on the screen. Now imagine that you want to print out the menu to share with co-workers or friends. Hit ⌘ P. It looks horrible, doesn’t it?
Well, fear not. Our friends at Smashing Magazine show us how we can make our pages look great in print with CSS through the use of @media! If you’ve got a website that you can even remotely imagine that someone would want to print, this is the tutorial for you!
CSSGram: Bringing Instagram-like photo filters to the web
Despite currently being a Photography minor, where I am assured that I should only like pure photography without any filters, I do love my Instagram filters. I’ve secretly wished there was a way to bring those filters with me to the desktop or the web. Well, it’s here. Now.
CSSGram brings Instagram-like filters to the web, applying those filters to photos using only CSS! It’s a testament, really, to the power of CSS.
Using the default OS font in CSS
If you’ve ever wanted to use the default font of the user’s operating system on your page, it could be a confusing mess for your font stack, or worse, having to use JavaScript to detect the user’s OS and select the right font to display. But I found this little snippet on css-tricks that makes it easier!
How-to: Full-page background photos
In my last post, we took a look at transparency applied to the main element over a large background photo. But I realized that I hadn’t touched on how to make that background photo work!
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