Wouldn’t it be great if we could style letters the same way we usually style text with CSS? In this article we’ll see how SVG filters help us to create playful, decorative web typography.
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CSS’ clip-path property is your ticket to shape-shifting the monotonous, boxy layouts traditionally associated with flat, responsive design. You will begin to think outside the box, literally, and hexagons, stars and octagons will begin to take form on your web pages. Once you get your hands dirty with clip-path, there’s no end to the shapes you can generate, simply by tweaking a few values.
While the focus of this article is on clip-path using polygons with CSS, all of the demos provide a reference to an inline SVG, in order to gain additional support on Firefox. Generating a responsive SVG clipped shape is trivial once you have created a responsive shape with CSS’ clip-path. We’ll look at this in detail later.
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It’s one thing to create a web application and quite another to create an accessible web application. That’s why Heydon Pickering, both author and editor at Smashing Magazine, wrote an eBook Apps For All: Coding Accessible Web Applications, outlining the roadmap for the accessible applications we should all be making.
Picture the scene: it’s a day like any other and you’re at your desk, enclosed in a semicircular bank of monitors that make up your extended desktop, intently cranking out enterprise-level CSS for MegaDigiSpaceHub Ltd. You are one of many talented front-end developers who share this floor in your plush London office.
You don’t know it, but a fire has broken out on the floor below you due to a “mobile strategist” spontaneously combusting. Since no expense was spared on furnishing the office with adorable postmodern ornaments, no budget remained for installing a fire alarm system. It is up to the floor manager in question to travel throughout the office, warning individual departments in person.
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If you’re a member of the web or UI design community, it’s been hard to avoid talking about Sketch over the last year. The launch of this design app shook up an industry dominated by Adobe for more than two decades, and it has caused an ongoing debate about whether Sketch is better than Photoshop and Illustrator (and Fireworks).
A longtime Photoshop user myself, I made the switch to Sketch in early 2014 and haven’t looked back. I love certain features of the program, such as the simple interface, file autosave and infinite canvas. However, plenty of other programs out there have similar features, and until the most recent update (Sketch 3.2), users were battling a lot of bugs in the app.
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Testing responsive websites is a laborious task. Until now, implementing a stable and maintainable automated solution for cross-browser and cross-device testing of a responsive layout has been nearly impossible. But what if we had an opportunity to write visual tests for responsive websites? What if we could describe the look and feel of an application and put this directly into our tests?
Upon considering this question, I decided to also look at another interesting side of visual testing. For quite a long time I have been a fan of the test-driven development (TDD) methodology. It helps me in my daily programming work. TDD enables me to formalize the task and to make sure everything is implemented according to the requirements.
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It’s just like that for your product, too: people rely on our products to work. Bugs erode trust, which in turn loses customers. So when we began updating Foundation, a responsive CSS framework, we wanted to ensure everything worked. Thoroughly. We know that many people rely on our software for their work, and maintaining that trust is paramount.
In this article you’ll learn our methodology for testing responsively, not just on a case by case, page-from-PSD comp. See, we’ve developed a certain system to make sure that nothing’s broken at launch on different devices.
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Responding to user input is arguably the core of what we do as interface developers. In order to build responsive web products, understanding how touch, mouse, pointer and keyboard actions and the browser work together is key. You have likely experienced the 300-millisecond delay in mobile browsers or wrestled with touchmove versus scrolling.
In this article we will introduce the event cascade and use this knowledge to implement a demo of a tap event that supports the many input methods while not breaking in proxy browsers such as Opera Mini.
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There are some things we know and like about SVGs. First, SVGs have smooth, clean edges on any display, so using SVGs can reduce the number of HTTP requests for image replacement. Second, it’s easy to make an SVG scalable to its container for responsive development.
In this article we’ll cover a few ways of using SVG sprites to describe motion on the web. I’ll show some techniques for using SVG sprites in complex animation that takes advantage of these factors. All examples shown will assume the use of an auto-prefixer and some basic knowledge of CSS animations.
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I recently teamed up with Mat Marquis of the Responsive Images Community Group to help integrate responsive images into the WordPress platform. We decided to refactor a plugin that I had built several months ago, hoping that it would lead to a more useable and performant solution.
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How does one design and develop for the responsive web? A lot of methodologies out there try to tackle this problem, but all of them rely on the same classic website development process. It boils down to the following: design and then develop.
Let’s go nuts and flip this outdated methodology on its head. Before we start flipping things around, let’s take a quick stroll down memory lane, just so we know where we’ve come from and where we are now.
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