CSS - Page 5

CSS / 13 Jun 2012

CSS Hat: A Magic Button That Turns Photoshop Styles Into CSS

Taking a design from Photoshop to the web in a click is not even a remotely new idea. For as long as there have been “web designers” there has been the dream of such a workflow. Today we’re going to look at yet another tool that makes this promise: CSS Hat.

CSS Hat is different than other apps that you’ve seen though. It’s not a full blown WYSIWYG aimed at allowing you to build an entire site without writing code, rather it’s a way to bust out a few quick CSS3 styles on a single element using the process that you’ve used for the past decade or more, right in Photoshop. Spoiler alert: it’s good. Really good. Read on to see why.

CSS / 7 Jun 2012

Build an Animated Photo Wall With CSS

Today we’re going to embark on the adventure of building yet another awesome and fun CSS demo. This time we’ll create a big, seamless wall of photos. When the user hovers over an image, a transparent black overlay will fade it out as a text label fades in and the image zooms.

The result is pretty slick and I’ve also thrown in a bonus second version for those that make it all the way through the tutorial. Read on to get started!

CSS / 30 May 2012

Code a Simple Folded Corner Effect With CSS

This week we have yet another fun and simple CSS project for you to hone your coding chops on. This time around we’ll be creating the illusion of a page with one corner that has been folded over.

With the power of pseudo elements, we’ll create some CSS triangles that we can then push into place to create our page fold. Once we’re all finished, you’ll be able to simply apply a class to any div to add in the effect.

CSS / 24 May 2012

Framework Fight: Zurb Foundation vs. Twitter Bootstrap

In the vast world of rapid prototyping CSS frameworks and toolkits, there are a ton of different options to choose from, but ever since Twitter’s Bootstrap hit the scene it seems like it has largely gobbled up this market. Is there room or reason for anything else?

The folks at Zurb think so and aren’t about to abandon their widely successful Foundation project. Having written about Bootstrap several times in the past, I’m going to jump into Foundation today and see what I think.

CSS / 17 May 2012

Cycle Through Client Quotes With CSS Keyframes

Client testimonials are a popular website feature. They bring credibility to a company and instill a sense of trust. If your other clients love you so much, I might too!

As a fun experiment, today we’re going to set out to build a cool little quote section that will rotate between multiple different quotes using only CSS. Along the way, we’ll learn all about how to plan and create multi-step keyframe sequences. Let’s get started.

CSS / 8 May 2012

Create Stunning Effects With CSS Transition Delays

I’m a huge fan of CSS transitions. Sure, they can be abused but on the whole they’re a really great and easy way to add a little life to your web pages. And let’s face it, they’re flat out fun to play with.

I’ve covered transitions a million different ways, but there’s one feature that I hardly ever touch: transition delays. Why would you want to delay your transition? It turns out that the effects that you can achieve become much more complex and impressive when you incorporate this one extra parameter. Let’s jump in and build some cool demos to show off how it works.

CSS / 3 May 2012

Code a Set of Animated App Store Buttons With CSS

I’ve gotten bored lately with all of the run of the mill, plain jane iTunes/Mac App Store buttons that I’ve been seeing around the web, so I coded up some fun little animated alternatives that I thought I would share.

This project is super simple, so even if you’re a complete beginner, you should be able to follow along. We’ll learn how to use some fancy techniques like how to incorporate icon fonts into a design and how to insert objects using pseudo elements.

CSS / 18 Apr 2012

Everything You Never Knew About CSS Floats

What do floats really do anyway? How do they affect the box model of the elements involved? How do floated elements differ from inline elements? What are the specific rules governing the position of floated elements? How does the clear property work and what is it for?

Floats can trip up even experienced developers and understanding their behavior can really set you free from many of the woes that you face with CSS. Even if you think you already know all about floats, we’ll dive deep enough that you just might learn something new!

CSS / 16 Apr 2012

Sass vs. Stylus: Who Wins the Minimal Syntax Battle?

Today we’re going to pit two CSS preprocessors head to head. You’ve no doubt seen lots of discussion about how SCSS compares to LESS, but where does Stylus, the new kid on the block, factor in? Can it possibly match the power and versatility of SASS?

We’ll jump head first into both syntaxes and compare them side by side to see which is more logical and versatile. We’ll also talk about features and give you a clear argument for why one preprocessor is more powerful. You can rest assured, we’re not going to wuss out and give you some crap about a tie, there will be a winner!

CSS / 10 Apr 2012

What’s the Deal With :target in CSS?

I’ve been seeing a lot of tutorials lately that utilize :target in CSS to perform some fancy feat so I thought I’d take the time to really dig in and discuss how and why this syntax works. Instead of blindly following someone else’s code, you should be able to wield this tool with the knowledge of what’s happening how it affects browser support.

Read on to learn all about the basic functionality associated with the :target pseudo class and how you can stretch that ability to perform all kinds of crazy stuff with pure CSS. Along the way we’ll build some great navigation and slideshow examples for you to learn from.

CSS / 3 Apr 2012

Build an Infinite Scrolling Photo Banner With HTML and CSS

Today we’re going to embark on the challenge of creating an animated banner of photos that automatically scrolls horizontally through an infinite loop. The best part: we’re going to do it without a single line of JavaScript.

To make this banner truly useful, our goal will be to use individual photos dropped into our HTML, not simply one long CSS background that repeats. This is pretty tricky but we’ll walk you through exactly how it works. Let’s get started!

CSS / 15 Mar 2012

Sass and Media Queries: What You Can and Can’t Do

Preprocessors like Sass are helping us flex our development muscles in nearly every area of our CSS. Variables, mixins, inheritance and many more great features make coding easier and more concise than ever.

So what about leveraging Sass for responsive design, or more specifically, for media queries? Are there any features of Sass that pair particularly well with media queries? Is there anything you should avoid? Join me as I experiment and discover the answers.