Category:Cascading Style 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

Tools

• Ceaser - CSS Easing Animation Tool
• Transforms tool for testing transformations and animations

Cascades and Specificity

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

Tools

• Specificity Calculator 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.

Gradients

Tools

• 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 - 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

Patterns

Tools

• nth-child-tester help you figure out what the nth-child controls will do.
• Stripe Generator generates stripes in a downloadable file that you can then x-repeat over the space that you need it to fill.

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.