Category:Cascading Style Sheets

General education and tutorials

How to Learn CSS by Rachel Andrew for Smashing Magazine covers each of the following topics with links to more in-depth resources. It's a tutorial's tutorial:

• Language fundamentals
• Selectors
• Inheritance and the cascade
• The box model
• Normal flow
• Formatting contents
• Being in or out of flow
• Layout
• Alignment
• Sizing
• Responsive Design
• Fonts and typography
• Transforms and animation
• Using cheat sheets

Animation

Animation is a design technique for drawing the eye to a specific piece of content on the page. CSS allows for designers to animate elements on the page efficiently and with little performance overhead.

Training classes

Web Animation Essentials: CSS Animations and Transitions by Rachel Nabors on her website

Tools

• Ceaser - CSS Easing Animation Tool by Matthew Lein on his website.
• Transforms tool for testing transformations and animations by Western Civilization

Cascades and Specificity

Also known as "why is this thing here overriding that thing over there?!?"

Tools

• Specificity Calculator by Keegan Street helps to display the specificity of a selector in a more understandable visual way.

Colors

According to this tweet by Eric Meyer:

FUN FACT: in CSS and SVG, 'gray'/'grey' (#808080) is darker than 'darkgray'/'darkgrey' (#A9A9A9) because that’s how they were defined in HTML and one version of the X11 color system, respectively. When the two systems were merged, nobody wanted to touch the underlying values.

• CSS Custom Properties and Accessibility by Cathy Dutton on her website describes how to use CSS variables to name colors in the system so the color palette is themeable and switch themes using Javascript and local storage. She also describes using these techniques for font face and font size.

Focus

• Focusing on Focus Styles by Eric Bailey at CSS-Tricks explains the basics of applying focus to elements, when to do it, and why. It also covers some upcoming focus elements not yet widely supported, such as focus-within.

Gradients

• Colorzilla's gradient editor will help you build pretty much any gradient ever with CSS.

Layers

Overlays: also called layers, info layers, help bubbles, modals, dialogues (but not HTML dialogs or Javascript dialogs...) anyway, they're things that pop up on top of the page you're on.

• Pure CSS Speech Bubbles by Nicholas Gallagher on his website - aka "how to give your help bubble a tail"

Layout

CSS Grid is hands-down the most effective recent way to do layout.

Flexbox is a close second, but only works in rows or columns, giving CSS Grid the edge in complex layouts.

Responsive Design is a layout tool that predates CSS Grids.

Grid Systems predate both Responsive Design and CSS Grids. While they're not exactly the way that we'd do design today, knowing about the visual design elements, planning a desktop layout with a grid system can help figure out a visual design system even today.

Naming best practices

• How to name CSS classes by David Boureau on his website

Sticky

Adhesive action with position:sticky! by Digitpaint explains how to put nav elements and similar items sticky to the top or bottom of a page using no Javascript.

Visual Design

• nth-child-tester by somebody on CSS-Tricks helps you figure out what the nth-child controls will do.

Stripes

• Stripes in CSS by Chris Coyier on CSS-Tricks, offers multiple ways to generate stripes in CSS
• Stripe Generator generates stripes in a downloadable file that you can then x-repeat over the space that you need it to fill.

Speech Bubbles

• Pure CSS Speech Bubbles - multiple techniques for giving a "speech bubble" look to content on your site, by Nicholas Gallagher