CSS & Design

Back in the day, centering an element was one of the trickiest things in CSS. As the language has evolved, we’ve been given lots of new tools we can use… But how do we pick the best option? When do we use Flexbox, or CSS Grid, or something else? Let's dig into it.

I have a set of baseline CSS styles that come with me from project to project. In the past, I'd use a typical CSS reset, but times have changed, and I believe I have a better set of global styles!

When we truly learn the secrets of the Flexbox layout mode, we can build absolutely incredible things. Fluid layouts that stretch and shrink without arbitrary breakpoints. In this action-packed interactive tutorial, we'll pop the hood on the Flexbox algorithm and learn how to do remarkable things with it. ✨

One of the most perplexing and befuddling things in CSS for me, for many years, was the behaviour of percentage-based heights. Sometimes, seemingly at random, setting height: 100% would have no effect at all. When I finally figured out what was going on, it was like a puzzle piece snapping into place; everything made so much more sense! In this post, I’ll share the epiphany I had, and we’ll explore some solutions.

CSS Keyframe animations are so much more powerful than most developers realize. In this tutorial, I’ll show you something that completely blew my mind, a technique that makes our keyframe animations so much more reusable and dynamic! 🤯

A little while ago, I was trying to animate an element’s background color, so that it cycled through the rainbow. Seems easy, but it turns out, browsers have a surprisingly big limitation when it comes to color processing! In this tutorial, we’ll dig into the issue, and I’ll share a couple of strategies you can use to work around this limitation.

CSS has been on fire lately, with tons of great new features. @starting-style is an interesting one; it allows us to use CSS transitions for enter animations, something previously reserved for CSS keyframe animations. But is the juice worth the squeeze?

The “linear()” timing function is a game-changer; it allows us to model physics-based motion right in vanilla CSS! That said, there are some limitations and quirks to be aware of. I’ve been experimenting with this API for a while now, and in this post, I’ll share all of the tips and tricks I’ve learned for using it effectively. ✨

Subgrid allows us to extend a grid template down through the DOM tree, so that deeply-nested elements can participate in the same grid layout. At first glance, I thought this would be a helpful convenience, but it turns out that it’s so much more. Subgrid unlocks exciting new layout possibilities, stuff we couldn’t do until now. ✨

There is a lil’ UI detail on this blog. Most people don’t even notice it, but the ones who do often reach out, asking how on earth it works. It feels like it defies the rules of CSS! In this blog post, I’ll break down the surprisingly-straightforward implementation so you can start using this trick yourself.

In game development, it’s common to use spritesheets for animation, but this technique isn’t as widely used on the web these days. Which is a shame, because we can do some pretty cool stuff with sprites! In this post, we’ll share the niche CSS function you can use to leverage this technique, and explore some of the potential use cases.

CSS Grid is an incredibly powerful tool for building layouts on the web, but like all powerful tools, there's a significant learning curve. In this tutorial, we'll build a mental model for how CSS Grid works and how we can use it effectively. I'll share the biggest 💡 lightbulb moments I've had in my own learning journey.