Link tags: units

Why you should never use px to set font-size in CSS - Josh Collinsworth blog

Reminder:

em and rem work with the user’s font size; px completely overrides it.

Meet Utopia: Designing And Building With Fluid Type And Space Scales — Smashing Magazine

An excellent explainer from Trys and James of their supersmart Utopia approach:

Utopia encourages the curation of a system small enough to be held in short-term memory, rather than one so sprawling it must be constantly referred to.

Fluid Space Calculator | Utopia

Type and space are linked, so if you’re going to have a fluid type calculator, it makes sense to have a fluid space calculator too. More great work from Trys and James!

Continuous Typography / MK

Sounds like some convergent thinking with the ideas behind Utopia.

I think that the idea that that any typographic attribute (including variable font parameters) can be a function (linear, exponential, stepped, Bezier, random, or otherwise) of any given input variable (user preference, screen dimensions, connection speed, time of day, display language, or whatever else) is an incredibly powerful one, and worth exploring as an aesthetic as well as a technical proposition.

Here’s a demo you can play with.

Unit deconverter - make your units less useful!

Take a perfectly useful standardised measurement of length, weight, speed or time, and convert to something far less useful (but much more fun).

Fractional. — Ethan Marcotte

Ethan’s ode to the fr unit in CSS grid.

The Unexpected Power of Viewport Units in CSS | Lullabot

A nice rundown of some of the fun you can have with viewport units.

I’m very glad the problems with vh units I wrote about a little while back is getting fixed in Chrome for mobile.

Get the Balance Right: Responsive Display Text ◆ 24 ways

Some really great CSS tips from Rich on sizing display text for multiple viewports.

Building Resizeable Components with Relative CSS Units | CSS-Tricks

A thorough and compelling demonstration of why it makes sense to size all the properties of your components—font size, margins, borders, etc.—in ems or rems rather than mixing in pixels for some properties. It’s all about the scalability, innit?