A handy tool for getting an overview of your site’s CSS:
CSS Stats provides analytics and visualizations for your stylesheets. This information can be used to improve consistency in your design, track performance of your app, and diagnose complex areas before it snowballs out of control.
Considering how much accessibility work happens “under the hood”, it’s interesting that all five of these considerations are visibly testable.
- Think about accessible copy
- Don’t forget about the focus indicator
- Check your colour contrast
- Don’t just use colour to convey meaning
- Design in anticipation of text resizing
I’m not the only one swapping out Sass with CSS for colour functions:
Because of the declarative nature of CSS, you’re never going to get something as terse as what you could get in Sass. So sure, you’re typing more characters. But you know what you’re not doing? Wrangling build plugins and updating dependencies to get Sass to build. What you write gets shipped directly to the browser and works as-is, now and for eternity. It’s hard to say that about your Sass code.
A great little mini case-study from Eric—if you’re exporting transparent PNGs from a graphic design tool, double-check the colour-depth settings!
I’d been saving the PNGs with no bit depth restrictions, meaning the color table was holding space for 224 colors. That’s… a lot of colors, roughly 224 of which I wasn’t actually using.
I never thought of combining the datalist element with input type="color"—it’s pretty cool that it just works!
I think these are great habit-forming ideas for any web designer or developer: a day without using your mouse; a day with your display set to grayscale; a day spent using a different web browser; a day with your internet connection throttled. I’m going to try these!
A nice standalone tool for picking colours out of photos, and generating a colour palette from the same photo.
Some excellent explanations for these five pieces of sensible typography advice:
- Set your base font size in relative units
- Check the colour of your type and only then its contrast
- Use highly legible fonts
- Shape your paragraphs well
- Correctly use the heading levels
What a lovely way to walk through the design system underpinning the Guardian website.
Bonus points for using the term “tweak points”!
Here’s a clever shortcut to creating a dark mode by using mix-blend-mode: difference.
This looks like a really useful tool for generating accessibile colour combinations from a starting colour.
A deep, deep, deep dive into the JPEG format. Best of all, it’s got interactive explanations you can tinker with, a la Nicky Case or Bret Victor.
Wheeee! Another fun experiment from Cameron.
This article by Cassie is so, so good!
First off, there’s the actual practical content on how to change the hover styles of SVGs that aren’t embedded. Then there’s the really clear walkthrough she give, making some quite complex topics very understandable. Finally, there’s the fact that she made tool to illustrate the point!
Best of all, I get to work with the super-smart developer who did all this.
My goodness, Meagan’s new site design is absolutely gorgeous! The colour palette, the typography, the texture, the motion design …it all communicates character and personality. Beautiful work!
I love this idea of comparing human colour choices to those of a computer:
I decided to do two things: the top three most used colours of the photo decided by “a computer” and my hand picked choices. This method ended up revealing a couple of things about me.
I also love that this was the biggest obstacle to finding representative imagery:
I wanted this to be an exciting task but instead I only found repeated photos of my cat.
Another good reason to use the currentColor value in SVGs.
Some advice from Andy on creating a dark theme for your website. It’s not just about the colours—there are typography implications too.
A search engine for colours.
I don’t really understand what this colour tool is doing or what it’s for, but I like it.