This is an interesting looking proposal for CSS grid to be ever so slightly extended to enable Masonry-style auto placement—something’s that tantalisingly close right now, but still requires some JavaScript to do calculations.
Lynn gives a step-by-step walkthrough of the latest amazing redesign of her website. There’s so much joy and craft in here, with real attention to detail—I love it!
This is such a great way to explain a technology! Chris talks through his thought process when using flexbox for layout.
A series of really nice CSS grid demos based on two-page magazine spreads.
Frank is redesigning in the open. Watch this space:
By writing about it, it may help both of us. I can further develop my methods by navigating the friction of explaining them. I’ve been looking for a way to clarify and share my thoughts about typography and layout on screens, and this seems like a good chance to do so. And you? Well, perhaps the site can offer a clearly explained way of working that’s worth considering. That seems to be a rare thing on the web these days.
The transcript of Andy’s talk from this year’s State Of The Browser conference.
I don’t think using scale as an excuse for over-engineering stuff—especially CSS—is acceptable, even for huge teams that work on huge products.
What a lovely way to walk through the design system underpinning the Guardian website.
Bonus points for using the term “tweak points”!
When min() gets better support (it’s currently in Safari), we’ll be able to create container queryish declarations like this:
grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(min(10rem, 100%), 1fr));
A new site from Heydon and Andy that provides CSS algorithms for common layout patterns.
If you find yourself wrestling with CSS layout, it’s likely you’re making decisions for browsers they should be making themselves. Through a series of simple, composable layouts, Every Layout will teach you how to better harness the built-in algorithms that power browsers and CSS.
CSS grid and custom properties really are a match made in heaven.
This is a really good explanation of the difference between context-aware layouts—that we’ve had up until now—and content-aware layouts, which are now possible with CSS grid:
With the
min-content,max-contentandautokeywords, we can size grid tracks based on their content. I think this is very cool. If we manage to embrace as much of the web’s flexibility as we can, we can get the most out of these tools, and let CSS help us with designing for the unknown.
This is a really nice glanceable reference for CSS grid.
CSS Grid is easy to use but difficult to learn. It’s a more intuitive paradigm than any other CSS layout technique, but it’s completely different from its predecessors.
Some great advice here on how to approach CSS grid:
- Use names, not numbers
- Use fr as your flexible unit
- Don’t use a grid system
Hidde takes one iconic design and shows how it could be recreated with CSS grid using either 4 columns, 9 columns, or 17 columns.
Side by side screenshots of websites, taken ten years apart. The whitespace situation has definitely improved. It would be interesting to compare what the overall page weights were/are though.
Jonathan shares his notes on that great flexbox container queries article from Heydon that I linked to.
Er …I think Heydon might’ve cracked it. And by “it”, I mean container queries.
This is some seriously clever thinking involving CSS custom properties, calc, and flexbox. The end result is a component that can respond to its container …and nary a media query in sight!
I think Cathy might’ve buried the lede:
The knock on effect of this was removing media queries. As I moved towards some of the more modern features of CSS the need to target specific screen sizes with unique code was removed.
But on the topic of Sass, layout is now taken care of with CSS grid, variables are taken care of with CSS custom properties, and mixins for typography are taken care of with calc().
Personally, I’ve always found the most useful feature of Sass to simply be that you can have lots of separate Sass files that get combined into one CSS file—very handy for component libraries.
Remember when I said that if we want to see CSS exclusions implemented in browsers, we need to make some noise?
Well, Rachel is taking names, so if you’ve got a use-case, let her know.
