CSS - Page 8

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 / 26 Apr 2012

Are Hover Events Extinct?

Odds are, :hover was the very first pseudo class selector that you ever learned. Heck, it might be the only one you ever learned. We all love this lovely little feature and use it constantly as a way to create enriched user experiences.

My question today could change the way you think about hover forever: “Does the ubiquity of touchscreens render hover events obsolete?” Put another way, did the iPhone kill :hover? Read on to see how iOS handles a CSS hover event, what that means for you as a developer, and how you should or shouldn’t be using hover events in your designs.

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 / 5 Apr 2012

3 Free Apps for Testing Your Responsive Designs Online

Responsive design has brought about a whole new list of challenges for web designers who have decided to take the plunge and leave static design behind. Creating a layout that works well at not one but several, or even all, possible widths requires patience, creativity and of course, lots of testing.

Nothing replaces checking out your design on the actual devices that you’re targeting, but as you’re building, it’s nice to be able to get a quick peek of the layout at various widths right on your computer. You could resize your browser window manually, but this gets ridiculously tedious if you’re shooting for precise pixel dimensions. Fortunately, several talented developers have already built some great tools to aid you in this process. Join us today as we take a look at three of them.

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.

CSS / 14 Mar 2012

Code a Responsive Navigation Menu

Navigation menus used to be a fairly simple thing. Code up an unordered list, float it left and you’re good to go. With responsive design being all the rage these days though you’re faced with some new challenges when creating a menu design.

Follow along as we start from scratch and code a simple but effective responsive navigation menu that you can easily modify and reuse in your own projects.

CSS / 12 Mar 2012

Use Pseudo Elements to Create an Image Stack Illusion

Today we’re going to see if we can take a single image inserted via HTML and make it look like a messy stack of images using only CSS. The key: pseudo elements.

Along the way we’ll see how embarking on a project like this can quickly lead to some messy code and how we can combat that with some awesome DRY coding practices.

CSS / 6 Mar 2012

Use Gridpak to Roll Your Own Responsive Grid

I love finding free tools that are capable of making my job (and yours) just a little bit easier. The web developer community is positively overflowing with talented people who are more than willing to share their creations with the world while asking nothing in return.

Today we’re going to look at one such tool from Erskine Design called Gridpak. With it we can quickly and easily generate our own responsive grid for building web pages that work well on lots of different screen sizes. It’s a little tricky to implement though so we’ll help you figure out how to set up your styles after you grab the download.

CSS / 29 Feb 2012

What’s the Deal With Display: Inline-Block?

We’ve been using floats for layout pretty much since we left tables behind. It’s a quirky solution that can often cause troubles, but if you know what you’re doing, it works.

One interesting alternative to floats that people are turning to more and more lately is to set the display value of an element to inline-block. What does this do exactly? How is it like a float? How is it different? Let’s dive in and see what we can discover.